


jamais vu

by wreckageofstars



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (1963), Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: 'human nature au but in the context of s12 for Maximum Angst probably rip', Action, Angst, Drama, Episode AU: s03e08-09 Human Nature/Family of Blood, F/F, Family, Gen, Human Nature, Jane Smith Is A Mess, Post-Episode: s12e05 Fugitive of the Judoon, Romance, Team TARDIS Try Their Best, h/c
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-09
Updated: 2021-01-24
Packaged: 2021-02-28 21:08:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 39,792
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23083729
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wreckageofstars/pseuds/wreckageofstars
Summary: There’s a paradox in the heart of Montreal, and a long winter ahead. Meanwhile, the Doctor falls through eternity and lands in the 1970s. The universe is inevitable like that.
Relationships: Thirteenth Doctor & Yasmin Khan, Thirteenth Doctor & Yasmin Khan & Graham O'Brien & Ryan Sinclair
Comments: 106
Kudos: 124





	1. What's past is prologue

_Quebec City, 1759_

Jean-Marie fled down the street, his basket of eggs clutched to his chest like a newborn.

It was a bit silly, maybe. He could hear cannon-fire in the distance, smell the smoke from here. There were British surrounding the city, all along the Saint-Laurent. His own father was somewhere out there, beyond the walls, musket in hand. The siege was ending. One way or another. He’d lived three months of his long fourteen years in constant fear of attack and now it was actually happening all he could think about was keeping his basket of eggs out of danger.

But there were his mother and baby sister to think about. Food would be short in the coming days, he couldn’t help but think a bit traitorously as he bolted his way home. They were going to win, of course. They had no choice but to win. The Marquis would fight nobly for them, his father would fight nobly for them, nobly for France, but—

There was a sinking feeling in his gut. Like they were all running out of time.

A few feet from _Notre-Dames-des-Victoires_ the ground shuddered beneath him and he skidded to a halt, stumbling into a nearby alley. He clutched his eggs tighter, the hair on the back of his arms raising. The church loomed before him in the dark of the alleyway. Solid stone, beautiful in its permanence. The oldest thing in the city, according to his father.

It should have felt safe, but it didn’t.

Jean-Marie stared up at its spires and shuddered again. In his mind, the stone was smashed and broken, the ceiling caved in, the whole structure ransacked and burning.

The whole city, ransacked and burning.

His hands were too full to make the cross. His knuckles whitened around his basket instead. He held the church as it was in his mind, solid and still, and tried to ignore the bellow of guns and cannons behind him. Held his mother and sister as they were in his mind, his father as he was in his mind, and tried to ignore what couldn’t be the future, encroaching.

He turned to the wall of the alley, to the weathered stone and wood. There were barrels stacked beside the side entrance to the church, and he caught a glimpse of a rat, scuttling away into the darkness.

And there was something—

Another blast shook the ground.

He took another step in, closer, closer. There was _something_ —

Something bright. Something twisting, something singing.

He reached out to _touch_.

In the distance, a piece of the wall crumbled, smashing to the ground. Jean-Marie’s basket smashed to the ground too, thunderous noise masking the crunch of a dozen fresh eggs. They fractured on impact, shattered white across the dirt, yellow yolks spilling into the bright daylight.

There was no one there to catch them.

In fact, there never had been.

_New New York, 3240_

“It ain’t exactly Paris, Doc,” Graham said, the dingy cup and saucer in front of him rattling as another hyperloop passed by. The walls of the cafe—as dingy and chipped as Graham’s teacup—shook alarmingly. Some of the ratty posters on the wall clattered loudly, cheap plastic against cheaper plaster. Yaz watched his fingers whiten around the saucer.

She took a sip of orange fizzy drink—a guilty pleasure, only this one was a bit too watered down to be much of a pleasure—and watched the world outside rush by. The hyperloop zoomed past them, too fast to see, still rattling the table. Beyond it, New New York towered, glinting silver in the sun. The cafe struck her as a bit out of place, actually. It smelled old. Everything outside was just as grimy, but it was all sleek lines and harsh edges and rusted metal, and this was—

Almost familiar.

At Graham’s thinly veiled complaint, the Doctor looked up from the sonic to squint at the ceiling.

“Well,” she said, “it’s seen better days, but it could be worse. It’s not totally charmless. Only mostly,” she muttered under her breath, ignoring the coffee growing cold in front of her in favour of glaring back down at the sonic.

“Why are we here, then?” Ryan asked. His own pint glass was nearly empty. “You said there were nuns who were cats in this city, can we go see them?”

“We’re just having a drink,” the Doctor said mildly, dodging. The sonic beeped. She glanced up. “All finished?”

“No,” Graham said, one hand curling protectively around his saucer, but she was already standing, her rusted chair scraping across the tile. She threw a handful of alien currency down on the table and bounced off, coat trailing behind her.

“C’mon, fam!”

Graham met Yaz’s eyes over his undrunk tea, exasperated.

“It’s never just a drink,” he said.

_Singapore, 2017_

Yaz took another sip of watered-down fizzy drink, frowning.

“You’re having us for a laugh,” Ryan said, halfway through his second pint. The walls of the cafe were still peeling in exactly the same place. Their table—the same one in the corner by the plastic plant—still had a scrape in the checkered plastic tablecloth, running straight down the middle. “That’s what this is.”

Graham sipped at his tea, looking faintly unnerved. The sun trickled weakly through the stained windows, far brighter than they were used to. Outside, a bustle of bikes and cars and lorries strained by, crowds of people pushing through. It was a cheerful sort of noise. Singapore was far less grim than New New York had been, much less stained and dreary. The inside of the cafe was light with sun, busy with people. Women in colourful saris, students hunched down over cheap noodles. A dog was tied to the fence outside, yapping at pedestrians.

But there was no mistaking that the cafe was exactly the same as the one they’d just been to.

“We’re just having a drink,” the Doctor insisted, but her coffee was untouched, again. The sonic whirred in her grasp. Her knuckles were white around it, Yaz couldn’t help but notice.

“We just had a drink,” Graham said.

She leaned back in her chair, deliberately casual. Her hair caught golden in a stripe of sunlight. “We’re having another one.”

“In this exact cafe.”

Her nose wrinkled. “Are you sure?”

“Yeah, I’m pretty bloody sure.” His cup clattered back onto the saucer. “The drinks are just as terrible.”

There was a cranky sort of edge to his voice that meant it was getting to be well past lunch-time. Yaz craned her head to catch a glimpse out the window, a hint of something real and moving. There was condensation gathered around her glass, cool against her fingertips. Her eyes caught again on the Doctor’s hand, white-knuckled around the sonic.

“What’s goin’ on?” she asked finally, taking another nervous gulp of her lukewarm drink. It fizzled down her throat to settle nervously in her stomach. “Really, I mean.”

The sonic beeped again. The Doctor’s mouth was a thin, unhappy line trying hard to be a smile.

Her chair scraped as she stood, coffee sloshing over the side of her cup, trickling into the long slash in the tablecloth.

“One more stop,” she said.

_Prague, 1989_

The window beside them had been wrenched open, and beyond it there was the sound of breaking glass, raised voices. Occasionally the shudder of vehicles going by would shake the walls and the leaves of the plastic plant beside them. Evening light gave the place an eerie cast, even though by now it was familiar. Familiar and deserted.

Everyone was out on the streets.

Yaz pressed her lips together and tightened her grip on the same lukewarm drink for the third time. Her teeth ached from all the sugar.

“Well, now this definitely ain’t exactly Paris,” Graham said tersely, eyeing the outside with trepidation. “What’s with the riots, Doc?” He turned his gaze to Ryan, on his third pint of the afternoon. “If you drink all that, you’ll only be tired,” he warned.

Ryan took a scowling sip.

“It’s only the Velvet Revolution,” the Doctor said absently, untouched coffee perilously close to her elbow, eyes still glued to the sonic. There was a roaring cry from the outside, hundreds of voices raised in chaos, rallying. The fervour of it raised the hair on the back of Yaz’s neck.“Don’t worry, it ends peacefully.”

“I know it ends peacefully, I watched it on the telly.” Graham wrapped his hands around his tea, not even bothering to pretend to drink it. Their orders were always waiting for them. Yaz hadn’t seen a waiter once. “Don’t mean I’m exactly keen on living it. What are we doing here, Doc?”

The sonic beeped. The Doctor finally looked up at them, and in the gloomy evening light her eyes were dark and honeyed. Almost yellow. Impenetrable.

“What does a crack in time look like?” she asked.

Ryan frowned.

“Hold on,” he said.

“In three dimensions,” the Doctor said, spreading her hands flatly against the tablecloth, knocking over her coffee. Yaz snatched at it before it could spill, but it slipped from her hands, cheap ceramic shattering over the cheap linoleum, fracturing. The dark liquid spooled under the Doctor’s boots and seeped into the lines of the tiles, but she didn’t seem to notice. “It would look like absolutely nothing. But if you’re a time-traveller who can see in four dimensions…”

She settled back in her chair, hands lifting, palms open, eyebrows raised.

Graham looked at her in alarm. “I don’t like where this is going,” he said. “Doc, are we inside a crack in time? Did you _take us for_ _drinks_ inside a crack in time?”

“Something’s fractured the universe,” the Doctor said, leaning in again, face strained in that way it got when she was unaccountably excited about something terribly worrying. “Punched holes through space-time and left little cafes in its wake. We’re following a trail of breadcrumbs.”

Her grin deepened.

“Shall we follow it all the way back to the gingerbread house?”

_Montreal, 1970_

She didn’t think the dream was her own.

In it, she walked in eternity, and eternity was white and endless and impossible. All of space, all of time, spread out and gauzy, threads she could pluck and examine, spiderwebs with a thousand strings. Singing, and the song was like nothing she’d ever heard. Nothing she could possibly describe. Not meant for human eyes or ears or brains, and so it —

Well, it hurt a bit, was the thing.

But she could never escape it. Not even when the threads spiralled away from her, not even when they tangled and sharpened and lost their song, wrapped around her throat like a vise. Not even when time unravelled in front of her and behind her and beneath her and she lost herself in it, lost her grip on everything, fell and fell and fell and only ever stopped—

—when she woke.

Cold air singed up her nose. They turned the heat off at night. Cold white glinted in through the window, lamplight on late October snow, glaring. Cold blue gloom painted the ceiling. Everything quiet like it only got in the dead of night, but not for long. Never for long.

Yaz waited for it, resigned. She imagined she could taste despair like a static, creeping through the thin, plaster-cracked walls. The despair might have been her imagination. The muffled sobbing wasn’t. It never was.

She closed her eyes against her nightly dilemma, that foreign despair crawling, reaching, searching. Guilt that was only her own settled behind her eyelids. She stilled herself, clenched her fists in the thin bedsheets, stayed where she was.

It was like that cat in the box, a bit. The one the Doctor had tried to explain to her once, when she'd asked. The one that was alive and dead, until you looked at it. Until you opened the box and looked inside.

She didn’t want to look in the box.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (hmmmmmm so I DO in fact have another fic or two on the go rn so posting this is probably verging on hubris BUT i did have a bit of a brainstorm earlier today and I'm really excited to finish this one, so don't be overly alarmed! I Have A Plan. maybe. well, you know, She's Percolating, ANYWAY)
> 
> I don't anticipate this one being too long. Should have a better idea in a chapter or so, so I'll update accordingly. Very little planning ahead, we die like men desperate for validation. On that note, thank you for reading, and I'd love to know what you thought!


	2. Rush job

_Montreal, 1970_

The October wind off the seaway was cold, but Louise Olivier ignored the morning chill as it whipped through the open scarf at her neck, tore open her coat, threw her skirt up around her knees. She ignored everything: the child tugging at her sleeve, the graffiti splayed across the brick to her left, the old man who sneered as he edged past her, frozen in the middle of the sidewalk. Michel shifted in her arms, burbling unhappily. She rocked him absently, transfixed.

There was a forest where the church had been.

Tomas’ sticky fingers were still wrapped around the sleeve of her coat. She’d always liked _Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours_. It was narrow and simple, but it had towered out towards the seaway, Marie fixed atop, burnished and beckoning. Hand outstretched.

“Mama,” Tomas said, tugging on her sleeve again. “Mama, it’s cold. Can we go?”

She tugged him closer to her, a free hand finding the top of his head, soft and warm under her palm. Keep close, she always told him. Keep close to me. In such strange times, she had to stifle her imagination, but she had to be practical, too. _Keep close to me_ , she never said aloud, _so that I can protect you with my body, if I need to_.

But the strangeness in front of her wasn’t the site of an explosion, or a car filled with dynamite, or a window smashed in and defaced. Breeze off the seaway lifted her coiled hair from her shoulders, blew through the impossible trees before her, rustling gently. Pine woods and clean air wafted under her nose and she remembered, with a dull pang, the odd occasion when her father had taken her and her mother out of the city for the weekend. She’d been as young as Tomas, once. It was so easy to forget.

As she breathed in the impossible forest, Michel still burbling away in her arms, Tomas unimpressed at her side, a dark-haired man strode across her line of sight. Firewood was in his arms, small sticks and branches for kindling. A harpoon was slung across his back, a fishing net. Through it, she caught the dead-eyed stare of several carp, their scales gleaming in the watery light.

The man’s hair was longer than hers. The breeze shifted it away from his face as he stopped in his tracks, staring.

Hesitantly, Louise lifted her palm from Tomas’ head—and waved.

Montreal, Yaz thought, not for the first time and certainly not for the last time, was very cold. The early morning didn’t help. Some of the dampness always seemed to dissipate by lunch, but until the sun bothered to rise, it all hung in the air like soup, lingering. Home might have been damp and chilly, but this was a cold that ached right through to her bones and turned her nose red in the meantime. She hunched deeper into the scarf wrapped around her neck and turned onto the next street, the wind finally at her back, blocked by the trees in the park beside her. Her feet tread a well-worn path. She did her best not to look like she was rushing. They’d all learned the hard way, lately, that it didn’t do well to look suspicious. There were police round every corner, and soldiers in between, and they didn’t need any excuse at all to pull you over. She swallowed harshly as a helicopter droned overhead. Her eyes tracked it through the sky. Headed west, towards the St. Lawrence. She watched it through the trees, waiting. If she was still right—

As it approached the waterfront, it vanished. Yaz waited. One second, two seconds, three seconds. It reappeared again, gleaming in the watery sun, like it had never disappeared in the first place.

 _Result_ , she thought grimly, making a mental note as she pressed on, still trying not to rush. Still not quite sure what all of it meant. The Doctor made it all look so easy.

The TARDIS was where it had landed—well, _crashed_ , if she were honest—all those weeks ago, still and silent in the corner of a back alley. The air was stale, and her feet crushed over broken glass and cigarette butts as she neared. She noted with tired dismay the scrapes along the edges of the ship, the graffiti sprayed across her side. _Liberté ou mort_ , she read. Freedom or death.

“Bit much,” she muttered. Freedom from, or freedom to? Weeks here, and she still hadn’t figured it out. She huffed a breath and stepped through the TARDIS doors, shoulders sagging with relief that she could barely admit to, even though the lights were dim and the draft followed her through. “Sorry,” she said, mouth tightening at the way her voice echoed, lonely. “About the spray paint.”

There was a flicker of light in the corner of her eye, blue. She turned her head to face the scratchy hologram.

“Goodbye,” the hologram said warmly, flickering.

“It’s the other way round,” Yaz said gently.

“Is it?”

“Doctor—”

“I’m not the Doctor,” the hologram said, scrunching the Doctor’s face, so familiar it hurt. “Do you need reminding? Do I need reminding?” The hologram frowned, and flickered away into one of the other shapes it sometimes liked. The little red-headed girl. Inexplicably Scottish. Inexplicably irritable, for a little girl. “I’m not her. I’m me. I go—”

The sound of the TARDIS dematerializing filled the air. Yaz smiled wistfully. “I know,” she said. “Sorry.” _But for a moment, it was nice to pretend_.

“It’s an emergency,” the hologram said, which it said every time. It sounded vulnerable, in this shape. The image of the little girl was always in her nightdress, bundled up in a raincoat and wellies. Like she was waiting for rain.

“I know,” Yaz said, softly.

“My thief—” it said, following the script.

“Safe,” Yaz promised. “She’s safe.”

“And the pretty one?”

Yaz smiled. “He’s fine.”

“And the sandwich one.”

“He’s fine, too.”

The hologram gazed at her for a moment, empty and static and strangely, awfully sincere. “And you?”

Yaz swallowed, oddly touched. She unravelled the scarf from her neck, and fished a crumpled up map from the pocket of her jacket. “I found another one,” she said, kneeling to spread the map out on the floor. A pen rolled towards her, helpfully. She took the cap off with her teeth and leaned over the map, searching. There were four circles already. A park near Rue Frontenac, the Place d’Armes metro, an abandoned toilet in the underground city, and a townhouse near City Hall. She added a circle over _Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours_ chapel, frowning. “No one’s noticed, still.” She shook her head. “How can they not notice?”

“Most people can’t see.” The hologram hovered over her, worried. If a hologram could be worried. When it was shaped like the little girl, it mostly just came out sounding cross. “Most people don’t want to look.”

Yaz thought of the graffiti on the side of the TARDIS, frown deepening. “Maybe they’re busy looking at other things,” she muttered, smoothing out the crinkles in the map. She glared down at it, willing any of it to start becoming more clear. “There’s still no pattern,” she complained. “They’re all within a few blocks of each other, but it don’t make sense.”

“They’re just holes,” the hologram said, crossly, arms folding over its nightdress. “They don’t have to make sense.”

“Everything has to make sense, somehow,” Yaz said firmly. “There must be a pattern, or a reason, or a _something_.” She rolled back onto her heels, folding up the map. She glanced up at the hologram. “Will you show me the flashpoint again? The newspaper?”

The console wheezed tentatively to life, groaning. The hologram fluttered and skipped.

“No change,” it said, sounding out of breath. “Look.”

Yaz reached for a portable screen and brought in down to her level, squinting. The third page of _The Globe and Mail_ gleamed up at her, staticky. The words kept rearranging, just like they always did. This was the paradox, the hologram had explained to her, weeks ago. This was the piece of poisoned time, poking holes through reality. The thorn in the lion’s foot. November 4th, 1970. A molotov cocktail would be thrown through the window of a downtown cafe and kill a mother of three. Or it would kill the children but not their mother, or it would explode in the thrower’s hand, or it would kill no one at all. The words shifted and contradicted themselves before her eyes, shimmering, twisting, never settling. It made her queasy to look at.

Yaz cast the screen aside with a clatter, frustrated. The console flickered and wheezed and went dark. The hologram stuttered.

“I don’t understand,” Yaz breathed. She glanced up, not daring to hope, never daring. “I’m sure she’d be able to sort it, if I showed it to her,” she tried. “If we could just _leave_ here—”

But the hologram shook its head, nearly frantic, red hair flying with the movement. “It’s getting worse,” it said, staticky. It flickered harshly for a moment, words fragmenting. “I’m stuck. I’m trying. I’m asleep. I’m so tired. Leave her buried. The temporal disregulation—”

“—will kill her,” Yaz finished the familiar script, heart sinking quietly. “I know.”

She glanced, unnerved, at the metal contraption still hanging from the ceiling, gleaming in the lonely light of the hologram.

“Don’t worry,” she said, tucking the map back into her pocket. She stood. “I’ll keep her safe.”

The woman called Jane was dreaming, but she wouldn’t remember it.

“— _crashing_ ,” she was saying, alarmingly. The words coming out of her mouth didn’t quite fit. Jagged glass, at the edges of her teeth. “But don’t worry about it, I’m not worried.”

“Doctor,” she heard, muffled shouts from behind, but her hands were flying over the controls, navigating by touch and instinct, “Doctor, what—”

“Don’t worry!” she shouted, lying, as the lever under her hand sparked and she was thrown backwards violently. For a moment, the whole world blackened around the edges. The TARDIS groaned and shook, moaning. Time, at a tilt and twist. Well, all of it had gone a bit pear-shaped, hadn’t it, really. “Don’t—” she tried, lifting herself up on her elbows. The TARDIS was whispering at the back of her head, and she didn’t like what it was saying. “Oh, I don’t think—”

“We’re landing!” Ryan called optimistically, even as he skidded sideways into a column. His fingers wrapped around it with a wince. “Doctor, you did it!”

 _Oh, I’ve done it, alright_ , she thought grimly. The TARDIS whispered more insistently. _But what exactly have I done?_ “No,” she shouted over the clamor, glaring up, sliding back. The console sparked again, as she clawed her way towards it. “No, _absolutely_ not, I forbid—”

 _Thief blue barn in the desert_ , the TARDIS said, shifting impressions at the back of her head, in what was probably meant to be an apology. _Bury you, but I’ll dig you up._

“No,” she begged, “no, please,” but there was a clatter behind her as it descended from the ceiling, red lights and smoke as they landed with a bone-shattering crash, shouts all around, but they were safe, they were _safe_ —

There was so little of her left to hold onto, these days. She didn’t want the rest to be scraped away. In that moment, there was nothing in the universe that frightened her more, even as the world blared red around her, even as she felt time splinter rather terribly. She’d found the gingerbread house, and it was made of poison. And she’d have rather died than forget, but as it stood, she didn’t have much choice in the matter.

She never did, something green whispered.

 _Rush job,_ the TARDIS whispered apologetically, as cool metal found her forehead. As she began to scream. _Sorry about the cracks._

The woman called Jane woke up, coffee sharp under her nose, telly blaring scratchily from the other room. The alarm clock beside her wailed a perfect C#, until she absently knocked it off the night-stand. The furnace hadn’t kicked in yet. When she yawned, her breath hung in the air for a moment, suspended. She spent another moment contemplating the merits of burying herself back down into her pile of thin blankets, warmth seeping away by the second. Dreams leaking away. They always leaked away.

She heard the front door creak open, down the hall. A paper bag crinkled, which meant pain aux raisins, probably. Still warm, if she hurried.

The floor was cold under her feet, and it creaked as she stood. There was a crack in the plaster of the wall, a chip in the doorframe, the metal of her bed frame rusted to ruin. Everything here was so old, she thought fondly. She liked old things. If something was old, that meant someone had loved it long enough to let it become old in the first place.

She pulled on a pair of mismatched woollen socks and wandered out into the hallway, away from the watery daylight and the last whisper of her dreams.

On the floor, buried under three books, two jumpers, a dirty sock, and two pairs of corduroy trousers, a fobwatch ticked away.

Forgotten.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> JFGHDFKJSGHDFLG hmmmmm how's that quarantine brain treating everyone
> 
> which is to say sorry for the massive wait lmao, I'm having a bit of trouble kicking the ol brain into gear these days, but I'm still hoping to get this one finished! I had to do a bit of shuffling around, so don't mind the odd adjustment if you've been reading up until now, I realized a slight location change was in order. 
> 
> (also we're going to acknowledge and then ignore my now undeniable cathedral obsession with grace and dignity thanks VERY much) (listen i'm not even christian i'm just a ho for stained glass and That's That)
> 
> also I realize this is maybe a bit obscure in terms of historical events lmao so if you're at all confused or want some additional reading about the October Crisis, feel free to hit me up! I ruled against Too Too Much historical exposition in favour of some better narrative flow, but it was a pretty interesting minute and it's worth the research, if you've got the time and inclination.
> 
> akhsfgdfksg anyway rip thanks so much for reading and I hope you enjoy! I'd love to know what you thought. Hope you're all well and keeping safe.


	3. Waiting for rain

_Montreal, 1970_

Ryan put his finger to the crack in the glass of the window. Cold air met his fingertip. Autumn, but the air was already damp and cold. There was a metallic bent to it that he’d never smelled before, and the lads down at the shop insisted that snow was on the way.

He’d always been excited by the odd sprinkling of snow, when he’d been a kid. Something about the dread in the voices of the other blokes made him suspect that this sort of snow wasn’t quite the same thing. If it ever fell. So far, all October had brought was soggy leaves, a chill off the river—

He watched a soldier cross the road, safe from the view out their flat’s tiny kitchen window.

—and tanks in the streets.

“They’re arresting someone across the road,” he said quietly. He watched, coffee growing cold near his other hand, as a man was dragged out of the flat beyond the window, struggling. His breath fogged into the air. The window muffled the shouting. Ryan imagined he could still feel it, through his finger on the crack. The vibration of sound.

“Not Mr. Delorme,” Yaz said, peering out at his shoulder. Coffee steamed from her own mug. He could hear the frown in her voice.

“No.” He took his finger off the crack. “I dunno who it is, never seen them before.”

Yaz’s voice dripped with false certainty. “Well. I’m sure it’s for a good reason.”

In Yaz’s world, no one was ever arrested for a bad reason. Or maybe that wasn’t entirely fair to her. She knew as well as he did, didn’t she. But when things went bad—and make no mistake, he thought dryly, still watching out the window, things had gone _bad_ —she tended to lean on what was simplest. What she wanted to believe, instead of what she knew was true.

In a situation like this, where none of them had any idea what was true, it had to be hard. He was trying not to get too cross.

“It don’t feel right,” he muttered anyway. “I know they found that bloke in the boot of that car the other night, but—”

“He wasn’t just a bloke, he was a politician. People are afraid,” Yaz said firmly. “That’s all. I’m sure it don’t last long.” He heard the hope in her voice. _And maybe we’ll be long gone before we ever get to find out_.

As if to prove her wrong, he heard the creak of the hardwood floors give way to the sound of Jane’s socks slipping on the kitchen tile.

“Morning,” she mumbled brightly around a pastry, spindly hand already sticky with the glaze. She was late, he knew, not by the ticking of the clock but by the tension radiating from Yaz’s shoulders. “Sorry, on my way out,” she said, which was what she always said, in deference to Yaz. Always in deference, like she knew, somehow, that she was making up for something. “See ya!”

“Jane,” Yaz said. Always so careful in turn, so determined not to sound harsh that she always ended up sounding cold instead. Ryan resisted the urge to look away, uncomfortable. “There’s soldiers out the door,” she said quietly. “Across the way. Be careful, yeah?”

“Oh, yeah,” Jane agreed absently, like she always did. “Laters!” She disappeared with a wave and the creak of the front door. Not the least bit concerned, about the soldiers, or about the bombs, or about the time her shift started in the depanneur downstairs.

Yaz sunk into the chair opposite him, looking tired.

“She forgot her lunch,” she said.

A few metres away, in another apartment, in another life altogether, Tomas was refusing to put on his rain boots.

“Your feet will get wet,” Louise reminded him gently, as Michel fussed from his chair in the kitchen. “And your socks.”

Tomas shook his head mutinously, back up against the front door, socked feet sliding against the green linoleum tile. “Don’t want to,” he insisted.

“It will rain today,” Louise said firmly. She crouched to look him in the eyes, knees aching, skirt bunching at her hips. She moved a springy curl away from his little face. Tomas took after her in looks, if not in temperament. They had the same hair. Michel was all curls too, but he took after his father. His father—

His father. Louise let out a quiet breath, uneasy, but before she could follow what was barely a thought, Tomas crossed his arms.

“On the television, they didn’t say.”

“The weatherman isn’t always right.” Louise, on the other hand, was always right. She knew the twists and turns of the weather as well as any radar. It was, possibly, her only talent. “Listen to me,” she tried, still gentle. She didn’t raise her voice, as a rule. Most of the time, it worked. Some days, like today, she wished she’d inherited a tenth of the iron in her own mother’s voice. “If you wear your boots, I’ll read you an extra story tonight,” she tempted.

Tomas sat back as he contemplated. He was more stubborn than her, but she had more patience. And, luckily, he was more easily bribed than a city councillor.

 _Please_ , she thought, the kitchen clock ticking away behind her in judgement. _I’m already going to be late_.

“Two more stories,” he bargained. Louise smiled, and passed him his rain boots, from where they’d been scattered amongst the disorderly pile of umbrellas and children’s shoes she kept near the front door.

“Two more stories,” she agreed. “Now _hurry_.”

She bundled him up in the traditional attire of Canadian children in the fall—a scarf, a toque, woollen mittens. No snowsuit, yet, though she knew that winter was on its way, and soon that would be another battle every morning. She bundled up Michel, too, who complained just as much as his brother, but without the luxury of speech. Then she set out from their flat, heels clicking on the old tile of the hallway, Tomas’ small, clammy hand clutched in her own, Michel nestled into the crook of her other arm. _Quickly, quickly_ , she thought without saying, picturing Mr. Monteforte’s face when she skidded in late. Again. She had to leave Michel with dear Mme. Delorme across the way and then walk with Tomas to school, and then she would still have to catch the metro downtown. And, she thought tiredly, eyes catching on the clouds she could see through the arcing windows at the bottom of the hallway stairs, it was still going to rain. She could feel it.

Eyes fixed on the gloom just beyond her, she reacted too late when the edge of her heel caught a crack in the tile above the first step. She clutched Michel closer, reeling, and for a moment she saw herself at the bottom of the stairs, crumpled, blood trailing from the crown of her head to mat in her hair, the contents of her purse sent sprawling, Michel sobbing, cradled protectively in her arms—

A pale hand reached out, clutching urgently at her coat, grasp so strong that she felt fingernails scrape her skin through the fabric. She fell backwards instead, vision whiting out as she collided with the ground and reality fell into place with a click.

“Sorry!” she heard, soft English in an accent that was hard to place and even harder to understand, “sorry, sorry, only—”

“No,” she said breathlessly, twisting gratefully to follow the voice. Michel burbled in the crook of her arm, unalarmed. Tomas took the opportunity to twist out of her grasp and scramble to his feet. Unharmed. All three of them. “No, merci. Thank you. Um—?”

“Er,” her rescuer said, a pale blonde in a threadbare sweater and trousers, sprawled across the tile behind her by the force of her rescue attempt. She looked a bit stunned by the fall herself. Her woven bag had fallen open. She tucked her hair behind her ear, uncertainly. “Jane. Smith. Just from—” She ducked a hand back in the direction they’d both come from, “—down at number six.” She tucked her hair again, and Louise wondered what she was nervous about. ‘Sorry, are you alright? Didn’t mean to grab at you like that.”

“No,” Louise protested, though she could already feel a bruise forming. She winced her way to her feet, as the stranger did the same. “I think you just saved all three of us. Thank you, again.” She reached for the top of Tomas’ hat-covered head, finding it warm and reassuring under her hand. A moment too late, she offered it to shake instead. “Sorry. I’m Louise,” she said, flustered. “Olivier. Nice to meet you.”

Jane shook her hand enthusiastically, smiling all the way to her eyes. “I’m glad I met you at the top of the staircase, instead of at the bottom. That might have killed the mood a bit. Er, well—when I say mood I don’t mean—well, I’m glad you’re alright, is what I mean. I think.” Her eyes were a strange colour—dark and light all at once. They brightened, when she smiled.

“Haven’t met many neighbours,” she went on, and maybe that was the source of the nervousness. “Just moved in a few weeks ago.” But the unease melted off her as she offered a serious finger for Michel to examine, and then knelt to shake Tomas’ hand very properly.

“You must be at least ten years old,” she said, which was precisely the right thing. Tomas straightened his shoulders.

“I’m _five_ ,” he said, beaming at her feigned shock.

“What?” she demanded. “No way. Well, five’s brilliant, though. You’ll love being five. What’s your name, five?”

“Tomas,” he said proudly. “And that’s Michel. Only he’s just a _baby_.”

She shook her head in appropriate disgust. “Not nearly as exciting, being a baby. He has a lot to look forward to. Probably.”

She talked so much and so fast, the words could barely make it out of her mouth in good order. Like she was always onto the next thought before she could finish the first. Or maybe, Louise thought, sympathy worming its way in under her lungs, it was just that she wasn’t so used to talking.

That was something she could understand, maybe.

“We’re in number two,” Louise offered, fighting off the instincts her own mother had drilled into her. Beating them back with something that lingered, quiet and desperate, in the pit of her stomach. “I haven’t, um. I haven’t seen you, before. I thought—I’ve seen an older man. I thought he lived there, in number six. Is he your family?”

“Oh! Yes,” Jane said, straightening. “Family. I have got one. My uncle, and my cousins, we all share. Cousins? Well, they’re his grand-children. I think. Does that make us cousins?” Her face wrinkled in thought. “Probably makes us close enough. Well, and none of us are especially related, I don’t think. Unless we are.”

A hand reached up to scratch the back of her head as she seemed to seriously ponder this dilemma.

“Uh,” Louise said delicately, not finding that she had much to contribute.

“Oh,” Jane said, eyes catching on the window at the bottom of the stairs. “Look at that. It’s raining.”

The two of them watched it quietly for a moment, as it spat against the window, rolled down in elegant drops. Louise breathed in the sweet, damp air that seeped in, cold, from the bottom of the stairs.

Jane tensed.

“Oh no,” she said. “I forgot. I’m late!” She took off down the stairs with no apparent thought to her own safety, moving in a way that reminded Louise of a spinning top about to fall, but threw a cheerful wave behind her. “It was nice to meet you!”

“You too!” Louise called down after her. A flash of white down by her feet caught her eye. She knelt quickly, snatching it. “Uh, you forgot—!”

But the door was already swinging closed, cold air trailing in like an afterthought.

“Hmm,” Louise contemplated, glancing at the small book she’d picked up. It had fallen open to a pencil sketch of towering spires. An impossible city, marked between the thin blue lines of the sort of notebook she’d use to write grocery lists.

She wrapped it in a handkerchief and put it in her purse, taking Tomas’ hand again. They approached the stairs more carefully this time. “See?” she told him, as they neared the bottom. The chilly air nipped at her exposed ankles. “I said it would rain.”

Tomas sighed.

_Montreal, 1970 (a few weeks ago)_

“Emergency protocols engaged.”

Yaz woke with a start, head pounding. So foggy that for a moment, she couldn’t place where she was, but the floor was humming faintly under her hands, and the air reeked of burnt toast. The TARDIS, then.

 _We’ve crashed_ , she thought. She remembered it, sort of. Her heart was still thrumming in her throat. The aftertaste of orange fizzy drink lingered in her mouth. Her head was resting on her forearms, like she’d tried to land softly—and failed, she thought with a silent groan.

“Doctor?” she tried, raising herself up on one elbow, eyes cracking open reluctantly. _Come on_ , she thought to herself, instincts kicking in. _Observe. Assess_.

What she could observe was smoking and flashing red, the whole console room bathed in flickering light. The sleeves of her leather jacket were singed. Ryan and Graham must have been thrown behind her. She could hear moaning, faint breathing. And the Doctor—

Crumpled at the base of the console, that metal contraption that had descended from the ceiling dangling above her, trailing smoke. But the image of her also flickered in blue just to her left, phasing in and out in time to the flashing of the TARDIS’ lights. Like a candle about to go out.

“Emergency protocols engaged,” the image of her said again, staticky.

“Doctor,” Yaz said, clawing her way onto her knees with a wince, fear clamouring for attention that she wouldn’t give. “Doctor, what—”

“I am not the Doctor,” the image said, flickering. “I am a voice interface. Emergency protocols engaged.”

“But—”

Yaz’s head was still foggy. She lurched closer to the base of the console on her knees.

“She was screaming,” she mumbled, reaching for the Doctor on the floor’s wrist. “She was—”

“Emergency protocols engaged,” she heard again, as Yaz’s hand closed in around the Doctor’s wrist. A single pulse thudded lonely against her thumb. Her heart dropped.

“No,” she breathed, twisting to see if Ryan and Graham were up and about, but they were both barely conscious still, shuddering awake, useless behind her. Useless, but alive. Relief caught in her chest, but only for a moment. She twisted back around. “No, no.”

She looked to the Doctor’s image, breathing harsh in her throat. “Doctor, what—”

“I am not the Doctor,” she heard again, the Doctor’s tinny voice, unmistakeable. The effect was unnerving, with the woman herself limp in Yaz’s own grasp. “I am a voice interface. Emergency protocols engaged.”

“You can stop—” she started to snap, dropping the Doctor’s wrist. “If you’re not her, then who are you? Are you—” She frowned. “Are you the TARDIS? What happened?” There were more important questions. “Is she alright?”

“I am not the TARDIS. I am—I am—”

The image flickered and buffered. The expression on the face of the hologram didn’t change, but the motion struck Yaz as somehow distressed.

“I _am_ the TARDIS,” it decided. “Sort of. It’s an emergency. Emergency protocols engaged.”

“You keep saying that,” Yaz protested, “but what does it actually _mean_?”

“It’s an emergency. I buried her,” the TARDIS said, looking meaningfully to the metal swinging from the ceiling. It looked to Yaz again, steadily.

“Now, you have to make sure no one digs her up.”

_Montreal, 1970_

The TARDIS spoke in circles and riddles, and it had taken the three of them a long time to finally coax a version of events out of it that made proper sense. Well. _Proper sense_. Proper sense, Yaz remembered thinking, was all relative when it came to the Doctor.

And when it came to the Doctor, as the TARDIS had eventually explained in twisting metaphors and non-sequiturs, she really was buried underneath herself. Like Ruth had been, a human life written over everything she was, even down to the single heartbeat Yaz had caught under her thumb. For her own protection, while they waited. Waited for—something.

It was the waiting, Yaz was self-aware enough to realise, that always got her in the end.

“You went to the TARDIS,” Ryan said in the wake of Jane’s feet out the door, not bothering to ask. The pastries were always a cover. Not that Jane would ever think to notice. For better or for worse, she lived in her own head.

Yaz said nothing, fingertips whitening around her mug.

“Look, I don’t blame you,” he said. “Probably good to check on it, once it a while. But—”

“Ryan—” she started, sinking into the seat across from him, wincing at the rips in the cheap vinyl. A hand reached up to grind into her forehead. “Can we not do this, for once?”

“I’m just saying,” he tried gently. “Maybe—if you had more to do, during the day—”

“What _are_ you saying?” she challenged. “Because you sound like my mother, talking to Sonya. There’s no police officers what look like me in 1970. And for whatever reason, the Doctor didn’t see fit to find me another job, so I—”

“We don’t know it was her.”

“Who else could it have been?”

Those first few moments, just the three of them and the empty shell of their friend in the cavern of her half-dead ship, had been terrifying. Purposeless. How they were meant to navigate all of it, by themselves, in a place where the past was both the past _and_ a foreign country had seemed impossible. But when they’d finally edged their way out of the doors, armed with the right clothes and ratty suitcases the TARDIS had spat in their direction, ‘Jane Smith’ limp in Yaz and Ryan’s grasp, there had been a brown paper bag filled with enough currency to last them a few months, sheets and sheets of documents, including pre-filled job applications and a lease that had already been signed, a post-it note (“NO PEARS!!”), and a newspaper article circled in red.

Helpful. But also, in a fashion that reminded Yaz painfully of the Doctor, not entirely thought all the way through. It would be too much, of course, to actually explain everything.

It was always too much, lately.

“I don’t know,” Ryan admitted. “But if it was her that did it, then it had to have been for a reason.”

“ _Exactly_.” Yaz set her mug down, barely flinching as some of the hot liquid spilled over her fingers. “Maybe she didn’t sort anything for me because I’m meant to—meant to—”

“Wander around the city aimlessly,” Ryan said, eyebrows raising sympathetically, “looking for trouble? Come on, Yaz. I miss her too. And this ain’t exactly a picnic, but what else are we meant to do?”

Yaz leaned in, half-scowling. It was a familiar argument, rehashed week after week. She almost didn’t feel like putting the effort it. “Why would she leave us the newspaper article, if it weren’t important? The TARDIS keeps showing it to me, too.”

“It’s important, ‘cos it’s gotta be the day we get out of here,” Ryan insisted. “She left it to give us some hope. To let us know it all ends. This isn’t some baddie we can sort out with a laser spanner, it’s just—just something we gotta live through.”

“I don’t want to just live through it.” She thought of the map folded carefully in the pocket of her jacket. “There’s something going on here.”

“It’s just the crack,” Ryan said, like he always did. “Messing about, like the TARDIS said, like a—a natural event. It’s the paradox causing local effects. We’re meant to try and _avoid_ them, not go hunting them down.”

“Yeah, but they’re not happening at random,” Yaz said. “There’s a pattern, I just can’t—I just can’t see it yet. What if it means we’re in trouble?” she implored. “What if it means _she’s_ in danger?”

Ryan only shook his head, still looking sorry for her. Frustration simmered in her gut.

“You’re just like her, y’know,” he said quietly. “You can’t bear to be still, and if there isn’t trouble to sort out, you’ll go looking.”

“I do not,” she protested, fruitlessly.

“It’s alright,” he said. “I get it. Waiting’s no good. Just—we’re meant to keep her safe. Meant to keep ourselves safe, too, I reckon.”

She met his gaze steadily, swallowing back her irritation. “That’s what I’m trying to do.”

He looked at her a long moment. “Yeah,” he said, sounding tired. Her irritation soured to sympathy. They were all tired. She wasn’t the only one going round the bend. “Well, I gotta go to work.” He stood, the chair scraping across the cheap tile. He grabbed one of the pastries, cooler now, wincing at the stickiness. He glanced at her again over his shoulder as he wandered out of the kitchen. “Be careful, yeah?”

Yaz took a sip of lukewarm coffee, the tank out the window catching the corner of her eye. The map in her pocket burning a hole in her heart.

“Yeah,” she muttered. “Always.”

“Mama,” Tomas said, legs swinging from his seat at her cramped kitchen table. Rain sputtered quietly against the windows of their apartment, carrying on from the morning and well into the evening. Spitting into the early dark, stealing away the last whisper of summer. It would freeze overnight and kill everything that was still green and growing. Louise knew this with a lonely kind of certainty. “The lady who we met in the hallway this morning. Aren’t we meant to hate her?”

Louise tipped the coffee grounds she’d been measuring carefully into her coffee pot, eyes narrowed.

“Has she done anything to harm you?” she asked mildly, turning to the tap for the water. “Has she done anything to offend you?”

“Well,” Tomas considered. “No.”

Louise shrugged, as she poured the water in and put the percolator on the stove. She listened for the sound, always quietly delighted. Wondered faintly, the same way she always did, if the five extra dollars tucked under her mattress would eventually grow into enough savings for her to buy an electric one.

“Then I don’t think we’re meant to hate her,” she said, turning to face him. “I don’t think we’re meant to hate anyone.” She passed him a glass of milk, reaching over the edge of the counter. “We must always try to be nice, and never fail to be kind. To everyone we meet, no matter who they are. Especially when they keep us from falling down the stairs.”

The phrase sounded like the sort of thing a parent might have told her, once, but she couldn’t remember. Either way, she believed it.

“Remember that,” she said quietly. “No matter what you hear, okay?”

Tomas kept kicking his legs, but drank the milk she’d passed him thoughtfully.

“Okay,” he said eventually. “Why are you making coffee so late? It’s after supper.”

Louise paused. The pot on the stove bubbled.

“Well—” she started.

Someone knocked tentatively at their door.

“Because,” she said, turning on her heels, overcome by a strange relief. “We’re having company.”

She could almost feel Tomas frown behind her, but she ignored it as she edged down their narrow hallway to answer. Her bare feet creaked against the ancient hardwood. The smell of coffee and the remnants of dinner she’d burned onto the electric rings trailed her down the hall.

Jane Smith was standing sheepishly behind the door when it squeaked open, soaked to the skin, one fist poised to knock again. She lowered her hand even more sheepishly at the sight of Louise.

“Er,” she said, shivering. “Hiya. Sorry to intrude. I don’t suppose—”

Louise smiled. “—we picked up your notebook from this morning?”

Her shoulders slumped in relief that overtook whatever embarrassment she seemed to be feeling. “Yes,” she exhaled, grateful. “Thank you. It’s silly. It’s really silly. Only, I—oh, I don’t suppose you found a packed lunch on the ground with it, did you?”

“No, I’m afraid not.”

“Ah.” Jane sighed. “Must have just forgot it. Anyway, sorry, I’ll just—”

“Coffee’s almost ready,” Louise said, before she could talk herself out of it. Whatever ‘it’ was. What was she doing, exactly? Only the coffee pot seemed to know. “Why don’t you have some?”

Jane blinked, mouth gaping, a carp on the shore.

“It’s the least I can do,” Louise hurried. “To say thank you, I mean. I, ah—”

Her gaze was drawn to the water pooling underneath her doorway. Jane’s threadbare sweater was soaked through. Her hair, too. She frowned. “You didn’t wear a coat, today?” She hadn’t noticed, earlier.

“Forgot that, too,” Jane admitted. “Graham says one day I’ll forget my own head.”

Louise swallowed back a smile, unsure if it would offend. “Come inside,” she said firmly, instead. “If I give you your notebook like that, the paper will dissolve and your drawings will be ruined.”

Jane frowned, a protest dying on her lips.

“You saw?” Red spread across her cheeks. “It’s just—I mean, they’re just—”

“Beautiful,” Louise said. “And I’m sorry. I didn’t look through, it fell open on the ground. You’re very talented.”

All she got in return was a very confused blink. Some of the red receded from Jane’s face, indignation retreating with it.

“They’re just scribbles,” she said quietly, oddly subdued. “But, thanks. Stole it out a kitchen drawer, that notebook, not sure where I’d get another one.”

She glanced down at her soaked, clammy hands.

“I could come in,” she said. “Probably. For a minute. If you’re sure?” She looked up, uncertain. Searching with her eyes. “Don’t want to be a bother. Or, y’know, un-neighbourly. Or to drip onto your floor too much, I assume that’s quite rude.”

“Not as rude as refusing would be,” Louise said, smiling. “You’re trapped by my offer of hospitality, now. You have to come inside, drink my coffee, and tell me all about yourself.”

“Not much to tell.” Jane’s hands twisted nervously together in front of her, but her shoulders had relaxed. The yellow hallway light from behind threw her silhouette into a soft relief, dripping in Louise’s doorway. A kind of want that Louise thought she understood all too well glinted in her eyes. “But I suppose, if it’s polite—”

“It’s very polite,” Louise reassured, hiding her smile behind a hand. She feigned tucking a stray hair behind her ear, to make the motion more convincing. “The most polite.”

“Ah,” Jane said, stepping through the door with purpose. Louise leaned in to close it behind her. “Well, in that case—“ She beamed. For the strangest moment, Louise felt like she’d somehow won something. “Coffee at Louise’s. Love coffee at Louise’s. _Oh_ —”

She paused in the act of struggling out of her shoes. Too soaking woollen socks, mismatched, squelched into the linoleum underneath.

“D’you have any biscuits?” she asked.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> RIP THAT QUARANTINE BRAIN im literally made out of brain soup these days and finding writing a bit difficult lmao but I'm still plucking away at this and I hope you enjoy!
> 
> I'd really love to hear what you thought, and I hope you're all safe and well.
> 
> (also I forget to do this constantly but just a reminder if y'all ever want updates/a way to yell at me on a different medium lmao, you can find me on tumblr @sunshinedaysforever !)


	4. Down the sea's throat

In the midst of little alleys and old cobbled streets—not so old as they pretended to be, for the ground beneath them was far older—and rain dripping down pipes and gutters like an afterthought, a cat skittered between the shadows.

It was a young thing, not quite grizzled, not quite haggard, but worn thin and raggedy in the manner of street cats, and it was hunting for its dinner. The cat did not have likes and dislikes, the same way that other creatures did, but it did its best to avoid the rain despite this, hugging the walls of warm buildings, never straying from their scant cover. And the cat did not have a family or a home, the same way that other creatures did, but it always returned to the same warm places at night, and knew where to lay in the sun during the day so the same warm hands would pause and scratch its head.

There had been no sun today, and very few scraps, and so the cat lingered down the alleys between the restaurants in the old city, hunting where it knew small rodents often lurked. There was the scent of one on its nose now, musky under the sweet, cold damp and the metal promise of snow. The cat stalked. Low to the ground, it crept between structures and the shadows of things it didn’t care to understand. Its nose twitched. Over the damp and the musky smell of terrified mouse, there was something else. Something bright, something sharp. A smell, and a noise. If the cat had cared to know about music, it would have sounded like singing.

The cat crept closer, silent. It had no hands to _touch_ —

Of course, then it had never been anything at all.

In the darkness left behind, a thick, lingering dissatisfaction spread like a thunder cloud.

Graham idly licked his thumb and turned the page of the newspaper, searching in vain, like he did every evening, for the barest hint of football. He leaned back in the threadbare armchair he’d claimed for himself weeks ago, resigning himself, like he did every evening, to the ups and down of the National Hockey League instead. Like it mattered, in the end. He’d learned the hard way early on—at least in this city, the barest whisper of support for a team that wasn’t the Habs was tantamount to treason.

Rain pattered quietly against the window, while he squinted down. Across from him, draped across an equally threadbare sofa, Jane snored away, dead to the world. Her socked feet dangled off the edge. Occasionally, he lifted his eyes from the newspaper to peer across at her, waiting for the combination of pinched brow and distressed mumbling that meant he’d have to nudge her awake before she jolted herself onto the floor.

He still wasn’t quite sure what to make of it all. As near as he could tell, the Doctor had rarely slept if she could help it. Jane Smith, on the other hand, seemed to do almost nothing but. Like the body she was keeping warm was making up for lost time—only he was trying not to think like that too much. He’d thought it was apt, at first. After all, Jane Smith might have _looked_ like the Doctor, but there was almost nothing of the friend he’d known behind her eyes. It was like she’d been replaced entirely. Only it weren’t really as ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ as he’d thought it would be. Maybe it weren’t meant to be like that at all, if what Ryan and Yaz said was true, but then, he’d missed all that business in Gloucester. Too busy being scooped up by flyboys in stolen ships.

In any case, Jane Smith wasn’t the Doctor. He wasn’t quite sure what she was, except for nice company in the evenings—though the snoring did get a bit loud, sometimes, he had to admit. He wasn’t sure she had to be much else, really. He wasn’t sure she was meant to be much else.

Their flat’s creaky floorboards sang behind him. He caught a hint of Yaz’s perfumed soap.

“Where’s she been?” she asked quietly, at his shoulder. He wasn’t sure where Yaz had come from, but she also smelled faintly of the cold. She was quiet about her comings and goings, lately, probably in the faint hope that by avoiding the topic she could avoid their worry—or their disapproval.

He put it aside for now and smiled ruefully at the suspicion in her tone. Graham might have made his peace with Jane Smith’s distressing ordinariness, but he was by the far the only one.

“At the neighbour’s, she said,” he whispered.

He could almost hear Yaz’s face twist. “Which one?” she demanded.

“Young woman with the little boy.”

“Oh.” Apparently, there was little fault she could find in that. The floor creaked as she settled back on her heels. “Why?” she asked, eventually.

Graham shrugged, turning the page of his newspaper thoughtfully. Headlines that would have alarmed him deeply weeks ago only caught his brief attention, now. More explosions. More arrests.

“Calling it a state of emergency, still,” he muttered, frowning. “And all them soldiers. You’ll be careful, going out?”

“Always am.” Yaz ignored the barest hint of trepidation in his voice and leaned down over his shoulder to read, squinting. She shook her head and sighed. “When does all this end?”

Graham didn’t have the faintest clue, but she knew that already. He’d been alive during the whole business, apparently, but he hadn’t been all that worldly, as a lad. Only kept up with the news inasmuch as it pertained to the football end of things—well, and so maybe things hadn’t changed as much as he’d have liked to think. Even so, it seemed to him that the whole business was edging near the definition of overkill. Tanks in the street and guns in people’s faces, all for the sake of a few blokes that had gone off the rails. Like a microcosm of the Troubles he’d also watched happen on the news, slightly to the left. But he wasn’t sure Yaz agreed, and, fairly enough, he wasn’t sure he was right. Truthfully, even weeks in, he still didn’t feel like he understood enough about what was going on to untangle it all properly.

Some days, if what he read in the news were true, it seemed like the people living through the damned thing were having the same problem.

“Can’t be much longer,” he reassured, rote words familiar out of his mouth. “Else we’d have heard about it, I’m sure of it. This is a blip. We’ve just landed in the middle of it, that’s all.”

“I know.” When he glanced up, Yaz had crossed her arms, was staring at Jane, dead to the world. “It just—” Her fingers tightened around her arms. “It just don’t feel very safe.”

He wondered if she’d let him take her hand, but settled for patting her gently on the arm instead.

“It will,” he said. “It will, I promise.” An empty promise, maybe, coming from an old man with little to look forward to right now but the comings and goings of the people he called family and the ups and downs of sport teams he’d never heard of—but he knew, better than the rest of them, how to wait. How to sit and hope. He knew, better than the rest of them, that sometimes it was all you could do. A month in, almost to the day—and maybe that was the reason Yaz’s face was so tight. They could all have done with the reminder.

The rain at the window sharpened. On the sofa, Jane stiffened.

Yaz glanced down at him, mouth a thin, unhappy line. An unspoken question lodged just behind.

“Why don’t you have your tea,” Graham answered, nodding towards the kitchen wedged in around the corner, where dinner was still warm on the stove. “I’ll wake her up.”

The thin grimace on Yaz’s face strained into a cramped little smile. She left with a hand on his shoulder, floorboards creaking. With a quiet sigh, Graham folded up his newspaper and set it on the coffee table, back straining as he stood.

“C’mon, cockle,” he murmured, going to the sofa. He nudged Jane gently in the shoulder, frowning up at the rain pounding against the glass. It was a heavy sound. Halfway to sleet already.“It’s alright.”

She fumbled her way towards wakefulness the same way she always did, dragged out of sleep blinking and yawning. “Graham?” she mumbled, rising to one elbow. Her bleary expression creased. “Oh, no, we were gonna do the crossword.”

“Already did it, love,” he told her, smiling sympathetically as she scrubbed a palm down her face, yawning again. “And you’re rubbish at them, anyway.”

“I am, a bit,” she agreed, straightening.

“We’ll do it together next time,” he said. She smiled back at him vacantly, and he returned to his chair, turning his back so she wouldn’t see the brief twist to his face. He was used to it—resigned to it, maybe—but the emptiness behind her eyes still got to him, sometimes. Despite himself. “How were the neighbours?” He settled back into his armchair with a groan.

“Nice.”

He nodded, eyebrows raising in invitation, but anything else she might have said was swallowed by another yawn. “Sorry,” she said, sheepish, dragging a hand across her eye. “Just had a kip. Don’t know why I’m still tired.”

“No shame in it,” he said, though he felt his smile weakening. “It’s well past tea, now, you’d be well within your rights to call it a day.”

“Mm,” she mumbled, clambering to her feet. “Might do.” One of her socks snagged in the hardwood, and she fumbled for the arm of the sofa. Her fingers caught it. With her other hand, she tucked her hair behind her ear, flushing. “Night, Graham,” she said, flashing him a quick, sheepish smile.

“Night, cockle.”

Graham watched her leave, something that felt too close to pity fumbling in the back of his throat.

She never seemed to realize that she was having bad dreams.

As the evening passed, the hard rain devolved into a heavy storm, syrupy hail protesting against the glass. Ryan slunk in well after tea, drenched, a few pints in.

“What?” he said, irritated, when Yaz raised an eyebrow at him. “Not like there’s anything else to do.”

Yaz couldn’t argue, exactly. She couldn’t begrudge him, either. In a way, she was glad for him. Ryan made friends wherever he went, and the boys he worked with at the automobile shop down the road were no exception. They’d invited him down for after-work drinks the very first week they’d arrived.

It was, she thought sometimes, stamping down an old bitterness, really quite a talent. Not a talent she’d ever possessed, but—well. She was good at other things.

Good at other things, like—these days—ruminating. Her sister would have teased her for slipping into such a bad mood, at least to hide her worry, but maybe Ryan and Graham knew better. Or maybe they didn’t know well enough. Frowning, she nursed a cup of tea by the window, watching. The sleet slammed against the glass outside, thunder rumbling in the distance. Out of the corner of her eye, Graham was still working his way through the paper, like he did every evening, while Ryan picked away at his dinner leftovers on the sofa Jane had vacated. 

“Do you think it’ll snow?” she wondered, mostly just to break the silence.

Ryan paused, his fork half-way to his mouth. “It’s meant to,” he said. “That’s what I heard, anyway. Graham? Or did you skip over the weather report?” he teased.

“Oi, I read it!” Graham protested faintly, adjusting his reading glasses. He licked a finger, pages rustling as he flipped back in search of it. “Let’s see, here—”

The sleet slammed against the glass outside, thunder rumbling. Graham was still working his way through the paper, like he did every evening, while Ryan picked away at his dinner leftoverson the sofa Jane had vacated. Yaz nursed a cup of tea by the window, watching.

“Do you think it’ll snow?” she wondered, mostly to break the silence.

Ryan paused, his fork half-way to his mouth. “It’s meant to,” he said. “That’s what I heard, anyway. Graham? Or did you skip over the weather report?” he teased.

“Oi, I read it!” Graham protested faintly, adjusting his reading glasses. He licked a finger, pages rustling as he flipped back in search of it. “Let’s see, here—”

He blinked.

“Hold on—” he said.

Yaz’s fingers whitened around her mug. Outside, a bright flash of light caught the corner of her eye. Thunder followed with a roiling boil.

“Did you feel that?” she demanded. Ryan frowned, fork still poised between his plate and his mouth.

“Feel what?”

Graham shifted, uneasy. He adjusted his spectacles again. “Well, it’s just—just deja vu or summat. Happens all the time.”

Yaz didn’t dignify any of it with a response. Instead, she abandoned her tea on the coffee table and stalked to the kitchen. The lights flickered on reluctantly under her touch, sending the cracks in the cheap lino and the sour shade of the kitchen cupboards into harsh relief. Sallow. She stopped in the middle, cramped between the wall and the counter, staring at the stove clock. 9:31, it read predictably, ticking quietly.

Yaz watched. She waited, breath tight in her chest.

9:30, it ticked, backwards. 9:29, 9:28, 9:27, the small hand of the little clock reeling in anguish, like a spinning top trying to fall. It struggled its way back to 9:30. Thunder roiled again, the same flash out the window she’d just seen lighting up the kitchen. Yaz heard the floorboards creak as Ryan and Graham piled in behind her, pausing at her shoulder.

“Well, that don’t seem right,” Ryan said dryly, but it was tinged with smothered panic.

“It’s the paradox.” Her fingers whitened around the door frame. “I _told_ you, it’s—”

“—it’s causing anomalies,” Graham said, steady, though his tongue tripped over the word. “Just like the TARDIS said it would. It ain’t nothing to worry about.”

Yaz’s gut twisted, unease and frustration mingling. As if to prove him wrong, a cry sounded between the thin walls. Alien, if only because before that moment Yaz couldn’t have possibly imagined what it sounded like.

The three of them stilled.

“That’s not—” Graham tried, but the sound carried again, bristling the hair on the back of Yaz’s neck. “Now, hold on,” he said quietly, grasping Ryan’s elbow as he made to turn. “This happens every night. I thought we agreed not to wake her.”

Ryan swallowed harshly. “Yeah, but it never sounds like _that_ ,” he argued, spooked. Shoulders tense, edging up around his ears. “That’s not crying, that’s—that’s—”

“She don’t remember it,” Graham said. His eyes had darkened. “She don’t remember it. The TARDIS,” he whispered grimly, “didn’t exactly do a cracking job of the whole fill-in-the-blanks business, if you ask me, but at least it don’t stick. It’s better we don’t wake her, son. Safer, even. Maybe.”

Thunder rattled the walls. Out of the corner of her eye, Yaz watched the clock on the stove spin nervously again, felt the hair on the back of her neck raise. The worst part about time being meddled with it, she thought, probably not for the first time, was that unless you were really watching, you might not even notice it. How many times had they had this conversation? It was impossible to know. The only person that could possibly have known—

With no warning, no ceremony, they were plunged into darkness. The wind howled at the window. Another stuttering moan echoed down the hall.

Like a haunted house, she thought with a chill, but she didn’t give the thought a voice. It was too close to the truth.

“Power’s gone,” Graham whispered pointlessly.

“Yeah. We can see that.” Ryan shifted in the dark. She heard him shudder. “Graham, I—”

There was a rustle of clothing. Yaz imagined Graham’s hand reaching for Ryan’s shoulder.

“It’s alright,” he said. “I’ll get us back to the sitting room. There should be candles,” he told Yaz. “In one of them kitchen drawers.”

Yaz agreed to look as the other two made their way carefully out of the kitchen. The creak of their footsteps echoed. Out the window, when she ventured as near as she dared, she only caught fleeting shadows as trees strained against the gale. The whole city, plunged into darkness.

She squinted.

Not the whole city. She pressed closer to the glass, breath leaving fog that she could barely see in the gloom. Faint light gleamed in the distance. Her fingers itched for her map, but it was too dark to see, and too difficult to make out the exact demarcations of the outage.

 _Paranoid_ , whispered a voice in the back of her head, and she wasn’t sure whether it sounded more like Ryan or more like Sonya. _You’ve gone round the bend, you idiot._

“I’ve not gone round the bend,” she whispered, but she stumbled back from the window as a tree branch snapped against it with a violent creak. The glass cracked further, already weak, but didn’t give. Wind whistled in, high-pitched, determined. Yaz breathed out sharply.

“Yaz?” Graham called from the sitting room. “Everything alright?”

“Coming,” she replied, stepping back. The thin hiss of cold air blew sharply against her face. Without looking, she fumbled for the right kitchen drawer behind her, searching for the candles, the matches. “I’ll be right there.”

Her fingers finally closed around them, smooth under her palm, against the click and noise of all the other junk in the drawer. For a moment, she just held them, kept her eyes fixed on the hungry dark outside, the wind still whistling in through the crack in the window.

“Yaz?” she heard again.

“I’m coming,” she said sharply, tearing her gaze away. She swallowed back the beating of her heart. The storm could wait. She closed the drawer quietly and made her way to the sitting room, a guiding hand tracing her way through the gloom. The floor squeaked and shuddered. The wind shrieked through the glass behind her, so she closed the door to the kitchen to keep out the chill.

“Window nearly broke,” she told them, setting up the candles on the coffee table. The match she struck sent shadows reeling over their faces. She imagined she could still hear the desperate, uneven tick of the stove clock, though it was far away, behind a door and a hallway. There was no way to mark the time, now. Only the dark, and the shuddering flicker of the candles she lit methodically. The light illuminated the fog of their breath.

Graham fretted about the window, while Ryan picked at the cold remains of his dinner half-heartedly. Yaz let her tea stay where she’d left it and settled tentatively on the edge of the sofa. Her pulse was still in her throat. She didn’t care about the window. If it broke, it broke. Her gaze drew back to the sitting room pane, the howling and wailing beyond the glass. The howling and wailing, one closed door away. Their cramped little living room was oddly still, in the midst of mournful sounds on all sides.

Ryan broke first.

“I—” he said, making to stand. Graham pressed his lips together, disapproval and unease fighting across his shadowed face. Pity, too, which made it all forgivable.

“I know,” he said quietly, sinking back into the sofa.

Sleet threw itself against the window, the reaching shadows of the trees outside menacing. Another chilling cry echoed down the hallway to their ears. Ryan closed his eyes.

“Go to bed,” Yaz said, unsure if she was irritated or trying to be kind. “Both of you. I’ll wait up, just in case.”

She stayed their quiet protests with a look.

“You’ve got to work,” she told Ryan. And as for Graham—actually, she wasn’t entirely sure what he did all day, and said so.

“You and me both,” was all he replied, a bit tetchily. But Graham never stayed irritated for long, and in the next moment he was nudging Ryan’s shoulder, rising to his feet with a groan in the flickering candlelight. “Come on,” he offered, worried and kind and always so terribly himself, no matter the circumstances. “It’s just a storm, eh? It’ll blow over, and the morning’ll be calm as ever.”

Ryan threw Yaz a glance she couldn’t decipher.

“Yeah,” he said finally, defeated by his own insistence that nothing was wrong. It wasn’t a fair thought. She acknowledged this and let it sit in her gut for a moment anyway. Then she banished it. They were all trying to keep her safe, in their own way. She had to remember that.

Once they’d lumbered off, she sat in the flickering gloom for what felt like a long time. It could have been a second stretched to eternity, or it could have been an hour shrunk to a pinpoint. It could have been the same minute, played over and over and over again, and in the absence of a ticking clock, there was no way for her to tell. There was only the hair on the back of her neck, raised on end.

Was it better in the dark, she wondered? Or would she have been better off counting every second, knowing exactly what she was missing?

For now, she only waited until she couldn’t stand it anymore. When she couldn’t stand it anymore, she went to stand before Jane’s door, far from the light of the candles. Far from the chill leaking in from the kitchen.

She lingered for a moment, her fingers on the doorknob. She steeled herself, for reasons that she didn’t entirely understand. She could hear the wind howling at the wall, just beyond. Distressed mumbling that she usually pretended not to hear.

With a heaving sigh, her fingers fell back to her side and she settled herself with her back against the door, instead.

It was Jane Smith dreaming, she reminded herself. Jane Smith crying out. Jane Smith, the stranger, and so she could wait outside the door and pretend not to hear and pretend like the guilt wasn’t eating away at her like an acid. She could do all of that, and still justify it in the morning.

Most days, anyway.

The problem was, Jane Smith’s dreams clearly weren’t her own. Yaz wasn’t sure what to make of it, she wasn’t sure how much of it obligated her. How much of the person she knew leaked out in the night? And how much of that person was she owed, even? The Doctor never slept where they could see. Yaz wasn’t sure she slept at all, if she were honest.

It felt like she was catching a glimpse behind a curtain she hadn’t even known about.

The Doctor wouldn’t have wanted this, though. Yaz knew that like she knew the sun would rise in a few hours, and it was the smallest of comforts, even as the truth of it stung. The Doctor liked them best at arm’s reach. She liked them best when they didn’t ask questions, didn’t press too close. She liked them best outside the door, and maybe that was why Yaz could never bring herself to enter.

“I wish you’d just tell us,” Yaz whispered.

But the Doctor didn’t trust them enough, she thought. Didn’t trust _her_ enough. They would never be equals in her eyes, no matter what Yaz did to try and impress her, and so what was really troubling her only leaked out in snappish fits and starts. Into hallways in the dead of night. Through thin walls and closed doors. Out the mouth of a stranger.

Alone, in the dark.

Yaz rested her chin on her knees and tried not to fall asleep.

In the dead of night, Louise woke with a start. Trees creaked at her window, shadows with long, taloned fingers. Spitfire snow spat at the glass. The world outside was dark.

She swallowed and sat up, heart hammering loudly in her ears.

The door to her bedroom creaked. Tomas filled the doorway, a small grey blur in the gloom, a shape among shapes.

“Mama?” he said quietly. She tensed. “Can I have a glass of water?”

She let out the breath she’d been holding. Felt the condensation linger in the air. The darkness outside clicked into place. No power. No heat. No water.

“You can have some milk,” she told him, shakily, and took him by the hand to the kitchen.

The fridge was dim and silent, though the hinge creaked as she opened the door. The only good thing about the chill, she thought numbly, as she poured Tomas a glass of milk from the pitcher, was that everything might stay cold enough until the power returned. She couldn’t afford to let any of it go to waste.

“Here,” she said, but her hand shook so badly as she passed him the glass that it slipped from her fingers, splattered across the floor, seeped into the lines between the tiles. Tomas jumped in surprise. Louise only stood there.

Tomas looked up at her, still barely more than a shape in the gloom.

“Mama,” he said, eyes gleaming. “Are you—”

“It’s okay,” she said quietly, reaching for the dishtowel on the stove jerkily. She kneeled carefully to sop up the milk. Her eyes tripped over a small, wooden horse that lay abandoned in the corner by the fridge. “Don’t move.”

But he was in no danger. When she felt for the glass she’d dropped, her hands found it whole, but for a sharp crack near the bottom. Her fingers traced the line of it. Nausea stirred in her gut. She bit down the urge to throw it into the wall. In the back of her mind, a thousand shards glittered on the floor, bloodied her feet. She imagined red footprints across the creaking floorboards, trailing down the hallway, into a room she wouldn’t enter and a door she wouldn’t open. 

She pulled herself back up and placed the glass gently on the counter.

“I’ll get you another one,” she told Tomas, placing her palm on the top of his head.

“It’s okay,” he said. “I’m not thirsty anymore.”

His head was warm under her hand. Her other arm ached with an emptiness she couldn’t describe.

“I’ll tuck you in,” she offered, but he shook his head in quiet mutiny. She pressed her lips into a smile. “Then I’ll read you a story,” she said.

She lifted her shaking hand from his head and rummaged through the drawer behind her for a candle. Her head ached. Rasping cotton, behind her eyes. She fumbled in the gloom. “Matches,” she mumbled, searching. “Where—?”

“I don’t need a story,” Tomas said. He tugged gently at the sleeve of her nightdress.“Can we just sit?”

Alone, in the dark. Louise swallowed.

“Okay,” she said. “Yeah.”

She picked him up like she hadn’t in years and brought him with her to the chesterfield in the sitting room, tarnished and old. The springs squeaked as they sat. The storm was over. Out the window, gleaming faintly, a layer of snow sat delicately over the street, over the cars and the reaching branches of the trees. Frost coated the glass in searching patterns. Tomas wormed his way under her arm, warm and wiggling and very alive. His heartbeat pulsed loudly in her ears.

Everything green was dead, she thought quietly, peering out into the hungry dark.

She’d been right.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> don't @ me about the cat I'm SORRY
> 
> thank you so much for reading, and I'd love to know what you thought!


	5. One damn thing after another

The power would be restored any minute. That’s what they’d been telling him for the past hour and a half.

It would be beyond him and the life he’d decided on for himself to complain further, Father Joseph thought, but his eyesight was going, and the candle-light flickering on his desk was doing a poor job illuminating the manuscript he was trying to read before today’s mass. And the _noise_ —

The incessant noise. Youths in the corridors, maybe, or tourists, where they shouldn’t be. Sneak-thieves, Protestants, or worse—repairmen from the hydro company. He’d been trying to ignore it all morning, but it had been going on for far too long. If anything, the noise was _growing_. If this was what it took to repair a broken power-line, well—

Father Joseph slammed shut the massive tome on his desk and stormed out of his office, knees aching.

“ _What_ ,” he demanded furiously, as the cacophony grew, “is the meaning of this?”

The sound of men shouting and bricks falling and hammers pounding was so loud it should have been right outside his door. His ears were ringing with the noise.

But the corridor, dark with polished wood, high ceilings that towered, was empty.

“Jane. _Jane_.”

Jane startled awake and nearly tumbled off the stool she’d been perched on.

“Yes,” she said, very smartly, straightening. She smothered a yawn with the back of her hand and tried to turn it into an unconvincing cough instead. “I mean, yes?”

Mr. Santos crossed his arms over his apron and gave her his very best disapproving glare. He’d had to amend it over the past few weeks, once he’d realized she was largely immune to some of his weaker renditions. It still wasn’t an especially convincing glare, all things considered. Mr. Santos’ eyebrows were very exciting, but his face was too good-natured, his eyes too kind, for the effect to be especially intimidating.

Jane wrinkled her nose in apology, mostly for being decidedly unintimidated.

“What am I paying you for, dear girl?” he wondered, just like he’d wondered every day for the past three weeks.

“For fixing your pipes?” she offered, adjusting her stance on the uncomfortable stool behind the shop counter. “And your shelves, and your furnace. And your hot water plumbing. Also—” she leaned over to put her elbows on the counter, tilting her nose to the front of the shop. “I shovelled your snow this morning.”

“Ah,” he said dryly. “Is that why there’s a snowman waiting to greet everyone at the front door?”

“I couldn’t just leave all the snow in a pile,” she protested. “It’d look a mess. Barney is a far better use for it. Plus, he’s got a great personality.”

“Your head’s in the clouds,” Mr. Santos said, shaking his head. He tousled the top of her hair fondly. “But you are a surprisingly excellent plumber. If only you could apply yourself to being more personable. Customer service,” he said, eyeing her pointedly, “is very important.”

“Oh, yes,” she agreed.

“Customer service,” he said pointedly, “means _being awake_ for the customers who come into the shop.”

She cleared her throat in what would have to pass for agreement.

“Sorry,” she mumbled, tucking a stray piece of hair behind her ear. She wrinkled her nose again, trying to banish the faintest hint of smoke she could still taste at the back of her throat. It was always there, when she woke up. A charred and acrid remnant.

Mr. Santos sighed. “I know,” he said, more quietly than his outward appearance would suggest he was capable of. Jane liked that about him. There was something appealing about people that were determined to prove to the world that what they ought to be like wasn’t what they _had_ to be like. Mr. Santos was large and intimidating and could have easily been mistaken for a person much louder and more intimidating than he was. Instead, he was thoughtful and quiet—and meticulous.

Really, she thought, shoulders sagging, it was a miracle they got along as well as they did. _And_ that she still had a job, after all this time.

“You need better sleep at home,” he decided for her. “I’ll give you tea. Old family recipe. Good, yes?”

“Very good,” she agreed.

“Two spoons of honey,” he instructed her. “For better dreaming.”

“Better dreaming,” she said, as he turned to edge down the depanneur’s narrow aisles, heading for the back. “Hmm.”

The problem was, she thought, straining to work the tension out of her neck as soon as he was out of sight, fixing pipes and mending the cash register were all well and good, but sitting on a stool for hours was awfully, terribly, _dreadfully_ boring. Which she’d told Mr. Santos repeatedly, to no avail.

“I have no pipes for you to fix,” he’d told her just this morning. “Everything is working better than it has in years. So,” he’d said, guiding her towards the stool. “You can do the job I hired you for.”

He’d touched the side of his finger to his nose, and the gesture had brought some strange twinge of nostalgia to rest in the pit of her stomach.

“And if you’re very lucky,” he’d said, smiling, “maybe something will break before lunchtime.”

So far, Jane thought glumly, leaning forward to rest her elbows on the counter, no such luck.

Seconds ticked by. The clock on the back wall clucked geriatrically. She kicked her feet against the legs of the stool, weathered soles colliding rhythmically in time, but that only drew attention to the seconds dripping by, one by one by one.

She peered over the shelves, straining for a glimpse of Mr. Santos between the canned goods and magazines. He’d disappeared to the back. Boxes to unpack. Or, she thought shrewdly, with a smile, cigars to smoke in the back alley.

Sleep was still tugging behind her eyelids. It was, she decided as she dove furtively into the woven bag she kept at her feet, an entirely reasonable diversion, if it would keep her awake. Her fingers felt for the ballpoint pen and the scrap notebook she’d fished from the depths of their kitchen. She let her hands take care of the rest, shoulders hunching, elbows scraping against the shop counter.

It wasn’t that she was an especially good artist. In fact, she’d realized ages ago that her technical knowledge was—well, non-existent. She knew nothing about art, nothing about beauty, nothing about technique. Only that there were things living in the back of her head, strange stories, impossible places, and that something deep inside compelled her to give them shape and form. Life, in the scribbly strokes of ball-point pens. She didn’t think too much about them. She only let them exist.

She didn’t think too much about anything, if she was honest. Probably it was going to get her in trouble one day, if what Mr. Santos said was right. Head in the clouds. Hands, ink-stained. More seconds dripped past as she scribbled down the spires of the cathedral downtown. She’d only been inside once, but she remembered the smell of it: old wood and varnish and small candles smoking. It had been oppressively dark. Cold autumn sunlight straining through the stained glass. Strange symbols carved into the pews. And at the end of it all, blue behind the organ pipes, gleaming with light, like the sun was just about to rise.

Jane didn’t believe in anything, but she loved things that were beautiful. The inside of the cathedral was beautiful, and so she loved it.

There was no beauty in her ink-splotched scribble. The cathedral’s shell towered spindly across the page, looming. Under the stuttering grip of her pen, the spires trailed and sharpened into unfamiliar shapes.

A polite cough interrupted her. Jane startled, pen dropping to the floor.

Her heart was pounding, she realized, momentary unease crawling up her spine.

Louise waved, tentatively, and the unease took a back-seat. There was a chocolate bar on the counter, waiting.

“Sorry,” Jane said, flushing, but Louise only smiled.

“A friendly face,” she said. “Nothing to apologize for.” She peered tentatively over the counter. “Is that Notre-Dame?”

“Meant to be,” Jane confirmed. “It got away from me a bit.”

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it,” Louise said, sounding wistful. “I walk past it every day.”

“I don’t like it,” Tomas said, yawning. “You have to whisper inside.”

Jane leaned over the counter, delighted. “That’s because everyone is telling secrets.” She grinned at him, pressed like he always was to his mother’s side, head under her guiding hand. He was bundled up in so many layers that his arms couldn’t touch his sides.

“I like your snowman,” he told her very seriously. Jane’s grin deepened.

“His name is Barney,” she said. “You could make him a friend, if you’d like.”

Tomas’ small face brightened. He tugged on Louise’s sleeve, beseeching.

Her hand left his head reluctantly.

“Okay,” she told him, though her pleasant expression had strained with worry. “Be careful. Don’t speak with any strangers.”

“I won’t,” he said, still very serious. “Can I pet the cat?”

Louise met Jane’s eyes over the counter, eyebrows raised. Jane shrugged. She’d never seen a cat outside before.

“Be careful,” Louise said again, as he darted out from her grasp, moving as quickly as his snowsuit would allow. She shook her head, smiling fondly. Worry lingered in the lines around her mouth. “Always on the move,” she said.

“Lots to see,” Jane said. “I remember—”

Snow-capped mountains and silver-frosted trees, running through cold, wet grass. Winter on fire. The wind at her back. A hand in her own—

“—when I was a kid,” she trailed off, finding that the beginning of the thought had no end.

Louise didn’t notice. Her eyes were far away today, too.

“Me too,” she said softly, gazing after Tomas as he slid through the door. The bell rang cheerily. “Everything was so big, so exciting. We used to go to the woods.” Her smile grew bittersweet. “I wish I could take him. All he knows is the city.”

“Why not take a trip?”

“I have to work,” Louise said wistfully. “And we don’t have a car. Maybe one day, when they’re—” She paused, a strange expression passing over her face. “When he’s older,” she said.

Jane smiled. “There’s always the park,” she said, reaching for the chocolate bar to ring it through. She shook her head, when Louise began to reach for her purse. “On the house,” she said with a wink. When Louise looked as though she might protest, Jane continued. “You’re our hundredth customer of the day,” she insisted.

Louise’s voice turned dry. “You’ve only been open for an hour,” she pointed out.

“I know, funny that. Busy morning.”

Louise shook her head, curls rustling. But she was smiling, as she placed the chocolate bar into her purse. “I don’t want you to get into trouble.”

“No trouble.” Jane leaned forward conspiratorially. “I’m an invaluable employee,” she whispered loudly. “No one else can keep the pipes from freezing.”

“Ah, so you’re an expert plumber, as well as an artist. I should have known.”

Jane tapped the side of her nose. “I’m a woman of many talents, I’ll have you know.”

When Louise grinned, her whole face lit up. Jane’s stomach flipped, which she ignored fiercely.

“If you’re such an expert,” Louise ventured, “I don’t suppose I could convince you to take a look at mine? The storm last night—”

“Of course,” Jane said immediately, straightening on her stool. “I can come round after work. No charge,” she slipped in quickly, before Louise could protest. “We’re neighbours, after all.”

People were kind to each other here, Jane thought. Or they mostly were, anyway. But they helped each other discreetly, without announcement, without witness. There was no expectation of reward. In fact, the act of offering compensation might be considered rude in itself, sometimes. Jane watched Louise think her way through the same considerations, before she finally arrived at acceptance with a quiet smile.

“Thank you,” she said, as Tomas came barging back through the doors, mittens coated with ice crystals, snow sticky with the rise in temperature.

“Mama,” he said, glueing himself to his traditional place at her side. “I can’t find the cat. Can I have some chocolate?”

“After dinner,” she promised, as they turned to leave. She gave one last glance over her shoulder at Jane. Dark eyes lingering. The bell tinkled cheerfully as they left. The gust of cold air that swept in on their heels was sweet under Jane’s nose.

Mr. Santos approached the counter, where he’d been hidden behind the shelves.

“Customer service,” he said, half in wonder. He ruffled her hair again. “I knew you had it in you.”

Yaz put her finger to a crack in the glass of the bus shelter. The fractures spread out from where her skin touched the glass in a network of lines, thin and fragile. If she pressed, she thought, eyes following the crack as the lines of it melted into frost. Fractals on fractals on fractals. If she _pressed_ —

A voice at her back raised in inquiry. She dropped her hand and turned.

A tall man in a woollen toque asked the question again, insistently, but he spoke too quickly. The words landed unfamiliar in her ears.

Yaz swallowed, embarrassed to find herself afraid. The man took in her blank, wide-eyed gaze—and the colour of her skin, she thought with disgust—and threw his hands up, irritated, as he wandered away. She let out the breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding.

On the wide street beyond the bus shelter, a tank rumbled by.

They’d closed it, she realized belatedly, feeling out-of-sorts. The street. There wouldn’t be a bus coming. Maybe that was what the man had been asking her about. Not that it mattered, anyway—she didn’t know why, and she didn’t know where it might have detoured. She was used to having the world in her pocket, she thought sourly, as she wrapped her scarf tighter and ventured out of the shelter. Here, she had nothing to help her. No apps to tell her where she was, or when the bus was coming, or what anybody was saying. Even the TARDIS wouldn’t translate anymore. Yaz wasn’t sure if it was because it was broken, or if it was because the Doctor was more involved in the process than she’d let on. Neither option was especially comforting.

Absent snowflakes had been wandering down from the sky all morning. Winter, blown in overnight. The snow under her feet had turned crusty and grey under the sun, as the day wore on. There was barely a centimetre of it, dead leaves frozen beneath it in a slimy grave. The crunch and crackle of it underfoot hurt her ears. The air was so cold that it stung her nostrils when she breathed.

It was pretty far from a winter wonderland, she thought as she walked, hunched against the wind. Resigned to her fate. The bus would only have saved her a block or two, but a few minutes ago it had seemed worth the expense. At the moment, she was half-convinced she’d never be warm again, but she hadn’t trekked halfway across downtown in subzero temperatures to turn around at the last minute. At least if she made it to the TARDIS, she comforted herself, she’d be able to warm up for a while before she made the same trip back.

The thought spurred her on for the last few blocks, as she picked her way through the same familiar alleys and cobbled back-ways. Cigarette butts frozen under the snow. When she finally reached it, the TARDIS was coated in a thin layer of frost.

More fractals. She wiped them off the windows with her coat sleeve, gently.

“G-goodbye.” The program didn’t start up right away. Yaz heard the voice first, a ghostly echo, before the hologram stuttered to life.

She stepped further into the TARDIS, cold and dark, shivering. Her footsteps echoed.

“Hello,” she said.

The hologram flickered away from its default, and the Doctor’s pixellated face shimmered and shrunk into the little girl’s. Yaz smiled.

“Why this shape?” she wondered, nearing the console. The TARDIS lights didn’t turn on, but the console hummed tentatively under her touch. A gust of warm air tickled the back of her neck. “Is it someone the Doctor knows?”

An unpleasant thought occurred to her.

“She didn’t travel with a child,” Yaz said slowly. “Did she?”

The hologram shook its head. “No. She left this shape in the garden. The first face this face saw. Come along, Pond.” Various voices that Yaz didn’t recognize tripped over each other. The hologram flickered uncertainly. “Come along, Pond,” it said again. The sound of it echoed, lonely.

The hologram blinked. “I like it,” it said in its own voice. “My thief listens to it. My thief—”

The script was beginning. Yaz wasn’t sure she had time to see it through, today.

“She’s fine,” she said. “So are Ryan and Graham. And me.”

She pulled out the crumpled map from her pocket.

“Another hole,” she said. “A small one. Sonic confirmed it. I still can’t see it, though.”

“If you could see it, it would be the last thing you saw.” The hologram flickered closer. “Where?”

“Big church. Downtown. Loads of tourists, I couldn’t get too close.”

“Don’t get close.”

“I’m not getting close.”

The hologram regarded her shrewdly.

“I’m not getting that close,” Yaz amended. “It’s hard to get good readings from far away.”

“It will be hard to get good readings,” the hologram said, irritably, “if you have never existed.”

“It’s hard to get good readings, anyway,” Yaz said, ignoring the implications. “There’s always interference.”

“The infection has spread. The whole city is cracked through, backwards and forwards. Maybe even beyond.”

Yaz crouched down to rest, fingers tapping thoughtfully on her knees. “Still don’t know why.” She smoothed the map onto the ground, frowning. “Still no pattern. But it’s like it’s—”

She tapped the map with an absent finger.

“Circling in, somehow,” she said, taking in the vague spiral formed by the places she’d circled. “Following something.” There was a clunk as her head impacted gently with the edge of the console. She breathed out through her nose. “I just wish I knew why this was happening.”

“Can’t see the storm when you’re in the eye,” the hologram said, stuttering. “You’ll be out of it, soon.”

“If it doesn’t consume us all, first.”

“It won’t.”

“It might.”

The hologram watched her for a moment, somber. “It might,” it admitted. “But the odds of that happening are—”

“Don’t tell me the odds.”

“They are small odds.”

Yaz felt her shoulders slump. A ragged, familiar loneliness had been slowly filling the spaces between her ribs, as the weeks wore on. No one was on her side, not really. Not even the TARDIS.

“I can’t just do nothing,” she protested quietly. If she wasn’t useful, then what was she good for? If she wasn’t doing something good, then what was she doing?

“The sonic is soaked in artron energy,” the hologram said. “Every time you use it, you bring attention to yourself. My thief—”

“I’m keepin’ her safe,” Yaz insisted, though Jane Smith’s absent, lonely gaze felt seared behind her eyes.

“That’s not nothing.”

The hologram had been slowly dimming as their conversation wore on. The TARDIS was tired. Maybe it was wrong of her, to keep waking it up. Wrong, to look for trouble when there wasn’t any. Wrong, to push someone kind away, when their only fault was not being the person she needed.

“I know,” Yaz said quietly, struggling to her feet. The metal of the console was still cold under her frost-bitten hands. “Maybe you’re right.”

Something old and bitter was settling in the pit of her stomach. She realized suddenly, with a desperate sort of irony, that the person she really wanted to talk to was Sonya.

The image of the little girl flickered away, until it finally blew out like a candle. The TARDIS wheezed and creaked, like her grandmother settling down on the sofa.

“Be careful,” the hologram’s voice echoed, warm. “Be safe. Can’t see the storm in the eye.”

“I will,” Yaz promised. As she turned to leave, the sole of her boot crunched over the corner of the map. She paused. Waited. Grabbed it furtively off the floor and shoved it back into her coat pocket.

Cold, metallic air greeted her as she edged the doors open.

“Hello,” the TARDIS whispered at her back.

She went home.

“It’s not glamorous work,” Jane said, sprawled beneath Louise’s toilet, a portable hair dryer in hand, “but it’s honest.”

Louise watched her from where she sat, cross-legged, at the mouth of her bathroom. “If I’d known the solution was this simple,” she said, hiding a smile behind a hand, “I wouldn’t have bothered you.”

“It’s no bother!” Jane insisted, though to be honest her hand was starting to cramp a little. 20th century electricity was so primitive—

The thought scurried away before she could catch it and examine it. Out of the corner of her eye, Louise raised a skeptical eyebrow.

“Okay, so it’s a bit of bother,” she admitted, on the off-chance it would earn her a few sympathy biscuits. “But I don’t mind, I promise. Does this happen every year?”

“Every autumn, winter, spring,” Louise said. “Summer, sometimes, if we’re unlucky.”

“No one should live here,” Jane marvelled. “How’d you manage, before? There,” she said, turning the hair dryer off. “Should do. Try the taps now.”

Louise rose, skirt rustling. When she turned the tap, water ran reassuringly down into the sink. “Good as new,” she said, offering Jane a hand up. “Thank you.”

Her fingers were warm and dry. Her grip was strong, and she pulled Jane to her feet easily. Up close, though, Jane could see circles under her eyes. The light sallowed her out.

Louise’s flat was very still. Jane had noticed earlier, but the strangeness of it had only just started to sink in, as the taps trickled behind her. Sound travelled, but the walls ate it up. There were far more doors than there were people for them.

“Louise,” Jane said, carefully. “Is everything alright?”

Her face stayed locked in a pleasant smile.

“Of course,” she said warmly. “Now, come and sit.”

In the end, they sat for hours, drinking coffee in the kitchen while Tomas played. Evening ate up the sun in the distance. It wouldn’t snow again, Louise knew. Not today. This was only a taste of winter. The rest would come, in time.

“Did it snow, where you were before?” she asked, elbows leaning on the kitchen table. Their conversation had drifted into comfortable silence, but there was a nervous part of her insisting that she break it, before her companion took it as a sign to leave.Her frozen pipes had been a poor excuse, but a welcome one. She didn’t want it to go to waste.

It was pathetic, to be so desperate for company.But there was a strange feeling in her stomach. Everything was twisted, tied up in knots. Everywhere, there was too much space.

Tomas was lining up toy soldiers on the window sill, just beyond Jane’s shoulder. He’d straighten them meticulously, then flick them off one by one and send them toppling to the floor. Then he’d gather them all up and do it again.

“Only in the mountains,” she said absently, smiling, oblivious to the scene behind her.

Louise hummed, taking a sip of her coffee. It was lukewarm. She was of half a mind to make another pot, but she didn’t want to assume. How long had it been, she wondered, since she’d had a proper visitor? Someone to talk to, someone to really visit with? Too long. Her biscuits were stale, but Jane didn’t seem to mind.

Jane didn’t seem to mind much of anything.

“I didn’t know there were mountains, in England,” Louise said.

“Oh, they’re teeny. Inconsequential. More like hills, really.” Jane trailed off, brow furrowing. “I—” She lifted her coffee to her lips. Her hand, Louise noticed, was shaking. “I don’t think—well, I suppose it couldn’t have been, then. I’m—”

She set the cup down without taking a sip. She smiled, nervously.

“Must be mixed up. Maybe I never have seen snow.” She tucked her hair behind her ears. “Took a knock to the head, before we left. Don’t really remember much. I think—” Her throat bobbed. “I think I didn’t leave much behind.”

Louise softened. It explained a few things.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, offering her palm upwards on the table. Jane glanced down at it, surprised, but took it. Louise clasped her hand gently.

“It’s alright,” she said. “I don’t really remember. And I wouldn’t have met you, otherwise. So it can’t be all bad.”

She smiled again, in the way that she did. Gentle and vacant. Like there wasn’t much behind her eyes, but Louise didn’t think that was true. In fact, she was beginning to suspect that it was the opposite.

“What about now?” she asked, against the quiet clatter of Tomas’ toy soldiers being pushed off the edge. “Are you happy here?”

“Well, it’s—” Jane looked taken aback. Like she’d never had cause to think of the answer, before. “Yeah,” she said finally blinking. “I think so. Everyone’s so kind.”

Kind, Louise thought, because she was looking for it. Blind to the rest of it, maybe by choice, maybe by happenstance. What a gift, she thought wistfully, to be able to see the world in such a way.

“You don’t ever feel like,” she pressed gently, looking for the right English word, “I don’t know, an outsider?”

For a moment, there was only quiet. Coffee, under her nose. Louise hated the silence in her house. It lingered, like something alive. “I never said that,” Jane said eventually. “Do you?”

“Sometimes,” Louise admitted, watching their hands, still intwined. Jane’s fingers were blistered, her knuckles raw from the cold. Louise’s hands were smooth and dark. “But not in here.”

She smiled.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> errrrr......so, what's 4 months between friends, eh?
> 
> (that being said I'M SORRY quarantine brain rot got to me and i fell off the wagon with this one, but it's getting winter-y around these parts, and I'm vibing again)
> 
> once again, I feel the need to apologise for, in this order: the cat (I'M SORRY), the baby (I KNOW), and also the fact that I have no idea how churches work and couldn't be bothered to research what the hell priests really do for a four paragraph scene. Sometimes People Obsess Over Religious Structures Without Bothering To Really Understand What's Up Inside Them To Cope.
> 
> That being said, the basilica in Montreal is just a jaw-dropping piece of architecture and I really recommend seeing it in person one day if you get the chance!
> 
> it's funny, this chapter ended up feeling a bit filler, even though in my notes it wasn't really meant to be. I hope you enjoyed anyway, and I'd really love to know what you thought! Thanks for reading!


	6. To Carthage then I came

Frost had plastered itself over the kitchen window overnight, snaking around the crack, spreading out in searching patterns. A week had passed since the storm. Winter had crept in quietly after it, settling like a cold blanket over the city.

For once, Jane was awake before him. Ryan frowned blearily as he wandered in, the smell of scalded coffee harsh under his nose.

“You’re up early,” he said, venturing over to pour himself a cup. The sludge that reluctantly filled his cup was barely coffee, but he gamely poured some milk in anyway, willing to give it a go.

The vinyl chair squeaked as Jane shifted to glance at him.

“Oh,” she said, one hand white-knuckled around the handle of her coffee cup. “Yeah. Suppose so.”

“Er,” he said, feeling uneasy. He’d never once seen Jane Smith so much as frown, but there was a familiar wrinkle between her brows. She looked more like the Doctor than she had in weeks. “Everything alright?” Not that he’d know what to do to fix it. He squeezed himself into the chair across from her, sipping wincingly from his own cup. Absolute sludge. That was how he knew it was the Doctor, under there. No human being was this bad at brewing coffee.

“Oh, yeah,” she said, and her face scrunched reassuringly. “Sorry. It’s fine, just—” Her free hand was grinding into the side of her temple, though, knuckles white. Freezing air was hissing in through the window beside them both, but she didn’t seem to notice it. “Ryan. Where we came here from.”

“Er,” Ryan said again, heart dropping to his stomach. He wasn’t a good enough liar for whatever this was, and he knew it. The Doctor would have known it too, and so maybe in the back of her head, so did Jane. Yaz would have deflected from it all sharply, and Graham would have shoved the crossword under her nose. All Ryan could think to do was go along with it all. “Yeah. Sheffield.”

Her brow knitted together. “Why did we leave, again?”

Oh, god. “Well,” he said, very reasonably, and not at all suspiciously. The coffee was acid in the back of his throat. “Why do you…think…we left?”

Her head shot up, confused. Distressed. His heart in his stomach softened. None of it looked right, on the Doctor’s face.

“Not like a test or anything,” he back-tracked. “Or, like…I just know you don’t remember much. Maybe it would help to try to…to try,” he finished, lamely. “That’s all. And I can fill in the blanks.”

And make up what he had to on the spot. God, why hadn’t he written down the story they’d conjured? He could barely remember it himself.

Her shoulders relaxed, just a hair.

“I just,” she said again, searchingly. For the first time, Ryan noticed the notepad at her elbow, scrawled through with pen. He couldn’t make out the image. “I realized I couldn’t, the other night.”

“Couldn’t remember anything?” He tried to sound concerned, but not alarmed. After all, she wasn’t meant to remember anything at all, really. She also, he thought with a sick flutter in his stomach, wasn’t meant to _care_. Or at least she never had before. Jane Smith’s life was empty, just like her head. What would happen, if she came to realize it?

But whatever was bothering her, it wasn’t that. Not yet, anyway. Her mouth tightened.

“It’s not that I don’t remember anything,” she said, finally. “It’s just that—it’s just—” She swallowed harshly. “I keep dreaming of a lighthouse,” she said. “Is that where we lived, before?”

Ryan swallowed back several words that weren’t especially polite. “Uh,” he stalled. Sure, why not? “Uh, yeah. Yeah, it were proper cool. Loads of…lighthouses, in Sheffield. Y’know.” _God_.

She looked back at him, stricken.

“But it burnt,” she whispered. “Didn’t it? That’s what I keep seeing. It’s all burnt to ash and bone.”

A chill blanketed the back of his neck. The hair on his arms stood on end.

“No,” he reassured her. “No, no, ‘course not.”

“But,” she protested. “What about—where’s the rest?”

Play dumb, play dumb, he told himself, heart pounding in his throat. “Rest of what?”

She looked at him strangely. “Our family.”

Right, too dumb. He back-tracked again, desperately. “Back in Sheffield. They don’t phone or write much. ‘Cos it’s….expensive. And—” He swallowed thickly. “Um, the doctor said not to push too hard. It’s alright, y’know. That you don’t remember everything. It’ll come back. Just—just don’t press on it.”

For the first time since he’d known her, he was getting the distinct sense that there was actual thinking going on, behind those eyes. She didn’t believe him, he realized. There was unease writing itself in the sharp corners of her lips, the whiteness of her knuckles.

“We’re out of bread,” he said, finally coming up with something worthy of deflection. “And, no offense, but this coffee is really bad. Want to go out for breakfast?” It was cold and they couldn’t afford it, but in the name of keeping everyone safe, he thought he could justify it.

The distraction worked. Jane’s face brightened. “Okay,” she said, clearly trying not to sound too excited. With a pang, Ryan thought back on the past few weeks. They’d never once asked her to do anything with them. Some family. No wonder the ruse was wearing thin.

That could change, he decided, smiling back at her uncomfortably.

After all, it wasn’t her fault she wasn’t the Doctor.

“Mama.” Tomas tugged at her sleeve. “Are you sick?”

Louise had been thinking about the hole in the world. She hadn’t walked past it in weeks. Part of her hoped it wasn’t there anymore.

There was a very quiet part of her that hoped it was.

“What?” she said, pulling Tomas in closer as the crowd grew more dense. She avoided the gaze of a soldier posted at the street corner, heart hammering at the sight of the large gun fastened to his side. _Uncivilized_ , she thought harshly, afraid. “No,” she insisted quietly, holding fast even as Tomas squirmed in protest at their proximity. His small boots, caked in salt and ice, crunched over the pavement. Her heart was still pounding. _Don’t make a fuss_ , she pleaded silently. _Don’t draw any attention to us_. “No, of course not.”

“You keep dropping things,” Tomas said matter-of-factly, still trying to duck out of her grasp. She held tight. “And you sleep during the day. Marta said her mother did that, until a doctor took her away.”

Some of Tomas’ blithe, youthful confidence faltered. Louise caught the worry underneath.

“No one will come to take me away from you,” she promised. She ushered them off to the side of the pavement, kneeling to adjust Tomas’ toque. She pulled it down over his ears and then touched his nose lightly with her finger, smiling. “I’m just tired.”

How to explain the empty space between her ribs to a five-year-old? There wasn’t any way to do it that was fair. But there was such unease in his lovely dark eyes. Tanks rolling down streets, and malaise roiling in her like a sea. He deserved better.

“It’s alright,” she said. “I promise. It won’t be like this forever.”

He didn’t look like he believed her. “Okay,” he said reluctantly. Baby teeth tore a mitten from his hand before she could stop him, and he dived into the pocket of his snow-suit, searching. Into her waiting hand, he placed a toy soldier and a crumpled daisy. “Here,” he said proudly, like it would solve all her ills. “You can have it.”

Fresh, she marvelled, raising the small flower to her face. But the unease in her heart was growing.

“Where did you find this?” she wondered.

If Tomas was disturbed, he didn’t show it. “At school,” he said, unconcerned. “In the schoolyard, it’s summer. Tabitha made a daisy-chain, and Madame said I could take off my hat.”

“How lucky for you,” she said, blood pounding in her gums, in the back of her neck. She placed the daisy carefully into her coat pocket and helped Tomas put his mittens back on. “What do your teachers say, about the summer?”

“They say,” he said, as they ventured hand-in-hand back out to the street, “that it’s nice not to have to wear a toque at lunch.”

The door to their flat slammed as Yaz slipped through, cold air drafting in behind her. Jane glanced up, a slumped silhouette at the kitchen table.

For a moment Yaz only stared at her through the archway, boots dripping water and salt onto the thin hallway mat.

“I thought you were at work,” she said. She tore a mitten off her only free hand with her teeth, wincing at the taste and texture of damp wool. Hand freed, she felt for the light switch until the entryway flooded with warm, sickly yellow. It banished the dull gloom of late afternoon seeping in through the cracked kitchen window. It was only half four, but the sun had already ducked behind the other townhouses, dipped below the looming shadows of the skyscrapers in the distance, the bent and crooked roofline of the old city. Jane winced at the light, or maybe at her tone, but it was too late to take any of it back.

“Mr. Santos sent me home,” she said quietly. The city through the window cast her grey. “Headache.”

“Oh.” Yaz swallowed awkwardly, mollified. “Sorry. You alright?”

She scuffed her boots off and nudged them off the mat, wincing again as water soaked into her socks. Their front rug was caked in salt, and never seemed to dry. The whole entryway smelled faintly of mildew. She was sick of it. She scraped her socks off as well in disgust, one-handed, and shoved them into her boots.

“Fine,” Jane said, in a tone of voice that warranted a second look, once Yaz had both hands free. “Where did you go?”

“Across town.” Two bus transfers, a student protest, and a military checkpoint. “Mr. Singh from number ten told me where I could get my hands on some proper veg. Thought maybe we could have more than sandwiches, this week.”

Graham wasn’t around to take fond offense. He’d taken to strolling in the afternoons, when he could. Well, he called it strolling. Ryan called it ‘wandering aimlessly’ and insisted on tagging along, when he was free.

Yaz never went with them. She saw enough of the city on her own.

Jane hummed in response, but Yaz could tell she wasn’t really listening. Her gaze was fixed on the window. There was a cheap notepad open at her elbow, scrawled through with pen. Jane Smith, Yaz thought, squashing down her distaste so it didn’t show on her face, probably didn’t mind having sandwiches for tea every day of the week.

“What’s that?” she asked, glancing over at the notepad. She deposited her bags on the counter, placed potatoes and carrots and scented rice into their water-marked cupboard. Peas, for the fridge. More milk. And a piece of summer, smuggled all the way safely from the grocer’s to their flat. Precious cargo, in this wasteland of ice and salt.

“I dunno,” Jane said. “Just—scribbles.”

Yaz watched her quietly for a moment, over her shoulder. “You never share anything with us,” she said eventually.

She caught the barest hint of scrawly petals, a carefully rendered face, hidden by the curve of Jane’s hand. It belonged to their neighbour, she realized, stomach twisting strangely, and she wasn’t sure what to make of it. The strange, quiet woman across the hall.

Jane closed the notebook, averting her gaze. She tucked a stray piece of hair behind her ear. “Nothing to share, really,” she said. “Is that a mango?” Her face creased with interest. “Must have cost a fortune.”

“I know,” Yaz said. She cut it open carefully, the way her father had taught her. Just one slice of the knife, and there was piney sweetness under her nose, fighting the chill in the air, the frost at the window. It wasn’t a very good mango, all things considered. Not the right season, not the right setting, it was all hard lumps and bruises, but she couldn’t bring herself to regret it. “I just—”

She set the pieces on a plate.

“You wanted a piece of home,” Jane said, thinly, with more insight than Yaz would have given her credit for.

Her throat was tight, all of a sudden. “Maybe,” she said, glad she was facing the counter. Her fingertips whitened on the plate. “Do you want some?”

She turned. Jane hadn’t moved, but she was alarmingly pale. There was uncertainty creasing her face. The two of them were hardly ever alone, together. Maybe it made her as uncomfortable as it made Yaz.

“You don’t like me very much,” she said quietly. “Do you?”

It had the feel of a question that had been simmering away for quite some time, and Yaz cursed herself for not noticing it sooner. Cursed the city, cursed the crack in the universe, cursed the Doctor and Jane Smith and whatever it was that had made her finally start to think for herself. Nothing was ever _simple_. Nothing had been simple since the Master had revealed himself on the plane. Ever since, the universe had been shrinking and tangling in on itself, folding up like a fractal with the Doctor at the centre.

“Of course I do,” she said, moving in closer. “What makes you say—I mean, what makes you feel—?”

Jane shrunk away from her, and the hunch of her shoulders was so distinctly un-Doctor-like that Yaz felt her stomach roil. But that was part of the problem, she thought harshly, forcing her white-knuckled grip on the plate to relax. They were separate. She had to think of Jane Smith as her own person, not the shell of someone else.

“I like you just fine,” Yaz said, willing herself to mean it. “You’re family.”

Jane’s eyes tracked her, unconvinced.

“Did I do something wrong?” she asked. “Before we left. I don’t remember—I don’t remember, but if I did—”

Yaz slid into the opposite chair, wincing at the creak of the vinyl, the clatter of the plate on the table. More sweetness lingered under her nose with the movement. “No,” she said firmly, reaching across. Jane gave her a freezing hand to hold reluctantly. Yaz’s fingers tightened around it. “No,” she said, “you didn’t do anything wrong. It were just an accident, all of it.”

“But something did happen.”

Yaz held her tongue, unsure of what exactly to confirm or deny. The story they’d thrown together was full of holes. It ran about as deeply as their lives here did. The truth was only an unconvincing paper trail away. Yaz thought about their folder of forged documents hidden underneath the stove, the paper bag of money Ryan kept in his sock drawer. The map crumpled in her front jacket pocket.

“Trust me, Jane,” she said softly. “Sometimes it’s better not to know.”

Jane shook her head, frustrated, and withdrew her hand. She ground it into her forehead instead.

“But—” she said, and there was a hint of red at one nostril. Discomfort in the twist of her mouth.

“Have some mango,” Yaz interrupted, stomach twisting. “It’s better fresh. I promise.”

It was ironic, she thought bitterly. The Doctor demanded their trust without ever having to ask for it.It wasn’t as easy, being on the other side of it.

“I don’t remember if I like it,” Jane said after a moment. She swallowed thickly, dropping her gaze, and the subject.

“Only one way to find out, then.”

Yaz shifted uncomfortably, shivering at the chill creeping in from the crack in the window. She felt the expanse between them growing. The shadow of everything they were avoiding passed by, like a great shark. The only sign of it was the water, disturbed.

“We should board that up until we can get someone to fix it,” she said, mostly just to fill the silence. “Or put a blanket over it or something.”

Jane paused, a square of fruit halfway between the table and her mouth. “I don’t know,” she said, so much more softly than the Doctor ever would have. “How else would the light get in?”

 _Aren’t you cold_? Yaz wanted to ask, but the answer was written in the raised bumps she could see on Jane’s wrist, the trembling of her blue-tinged hands. Besides, it would have sounded too critical. Everything that came out her mouth did, these days, and she couldn’t seem to stop it. Under pressure, she was warping and wilting into her mother, sharp-tongued and indignant. She felt like she was scattering back into a person she thought she’d left behind.

“I guess you’re right,” she said instead, though the light trickling in weakly through the window was watery and grey, like the city beyond it. Jane wasn’t looking at the city, she realized, as the two of them ate the rest of the mango in silence. She was gazing intently at the crack, her eyes very far away.

In the watery gloom, Yaz watched a thin trail of blood creep lazily from one nostril to encroach on her upper lip.

Ryan held off on mentioning the conversation to the other two for as long as he could. It was selfish, probably, but in his heart he couldn’t find it in himself to feel too bad. Yaz jumped on the slightest things, lately, the barest hints of trouble. It would be easier for her, if all of it was well and truly fine.

The thing was, he was starting to think that it wasn’t.

When he finally did broach the subject one evening, the three of them crammed into the kitchen, conversing in hissing whispers, they reacted just like he’d thought they would.

“A _lighthouse_?” Yaz said, scathing. There were dark shadows carved out under her eyes. Ryan didn’t think she’d been sleeping well. “If she picks up a map or a book or summat, she’s going to have loads of questions you won’t be able to answer.”

Ryan had never even seen the lighthouse. He hadn’t seen Ruth, either, once she’d gone and changed. The Doctor had told them what had happened, but she’d been characteristically tight-lipped about the whole thing. What did it mean, he wondered, if Jane Smith was dreaming about it? Did she dream the same dreams the Doctor did?

He wasn’t even sure if the Doctor dreamed at all, if he were honest. Or if she slept. He’d never seen it, not since the first time they’d met, and she’d been—

Born, he thought, realizing with an unsettling start that he finally believed it. She’d just been born, then. God, that night felt like a lifetime ago. In a way, it had been. They were all different people now. The Doctor most of all, maybe.

“I _panicked_ ,” he hissed back, peering into the lounge, where Jane was entertaining one of the neighbour’s kids. The nice lady across the hall. She’d come down with something, Jane had said, when she’d walked in the door after work with a kid in hand, and couldn’t Tomas stay for dinner?

The irony wasn’t lost on him. As soon as he’d decided to try and spend more time with her, she’d started spending all her time across the hall, just out of reach. Maybe it was nicer, he thought, spending time with people that had no expectations of you.

Graham laid a gentle hand on Yaz’s upper arm. “It’s alright,” he soothed, peace-brokering by the skin of his teeth. He was worried, too. Ryan could see it in his eyes. “Just have to keep an eye on it, that’s all. She was already having an identity crisis,” he sighed, gaze flitting to the wall between them and the lounge. “She don’t need another.”

“It’s nearly November,” Yaz said. “Just a few more days.” But her lips were bloodless.

Ryan leaned against the doorframe, turning his back on Yaz and Graham.

“Once upon a time—oh, or once upon _many_ times, maybe,” Jane was saying, the neighbour’s kid perched sideways on her lap, legs swinging, “there was—” The story was clearly a spur of the moment idea. Her tongue caught at the edge of her teeth as she thought. “An _inventor_.”

The boy—there was a small plastic soldier clutched in his tiny hand—kept swinging his legs, but his eyes stayed glued to Jane’s face, transfixed.

“An inventor with two hearts,” she continued. “From a land called Gallifrey.”

Ryan’s breath caught, at the edge of the room.

“Why did he have two hearts?” the boy asked, frowning up at her. Jane tapped him gently on the nose. There was an odd look in her eyes.

“So he could love everything better,” she said.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> happy thanksgiving! short and sweet this week, but we're heading into the end-game territory, a bit. thank you so much for reading this far! I'd love to know what you think, and I'm so grateful to you for reading. <3


	7. Summer land

Supper was a stilted, awkward affair, probably. Tomas didn’t seem to notice. Children, Jane reasoned, as she took him by the hand back across the hall, were infinitely easier than adults. Easier to understand, easier to talk to. She couldn’t have said exactly why. It was the lack of expectations, maybe. Tomas never looked at her funny. He didn’t know she was meant to be something else.

Jane was never sure what else, exactly, she was meant to be—but the expectation lingered behind the eyes of everyone she met, regardless. She hadn’t noticed it for a long time, either. She’d been as blind as Tomas was. But now the feeling was unmistakeable, and hard to shake. It crawled across the back of her neck, had sat itself uneasily in the space behind her teeth.

All she could do was try to ignore it.

The door to Louise’s flat opened with a soft creak, unlocked. Jane flipped the light on, watched the wind drag tree branches across the window in the sitting room. They clattered against the frosted glass. Almost like fingers, she thought uneasily, as she knelt to help Tomas take off his shoes, her knees dampening on the soggy front mat. Salt had caked into the woven rings, the rubber soles of Tomas’ boots. She placed them with the other shoes piled high in an untidy mess by the door. Louise’s pumps, a pair of green wellies. Men’s slippers, well-worn. At the bottom of the pile, well-hidden, were a small pair of shiny red dress shoes.

Jane frowned.

“Tomas,” she said quietly. “Are these—?”

But he’d already wandered further into the flat, out from under her eye, the warmth of the entry light. She rose to follow him, still frowning. Louise’s flat was still full of the same oppressive quiet, like walking under a thunder cloud, or plunging your head underwater. It made her head feel full of static.

Maybe it filled Louise’s head, too. She’d looked so tired, earlier.

“She’s still asleep,” Tomas told her at the mouth of the hallway, a small, gloomy silhouette. The door to Louise’s room was only open the barest crack. The darkness beyond it was impenetrable.

“That’s alright,” Jane said, trying to sound reassuring. “We’ll leave her be. I’ll put you to bed, if you like.”

Tomas regarded her intently. “Will you read me a story?” he asked.

Jane smiled. “Of course.”

She waited in the dimly-lit hall while Tomas put his pyjamas on, cataloguing. The water-stain on the ceiling in the shape of Australia, the faded crayon drawings on the walls. One of the floor-boards was loose. At the end of the hall, there was a closed door.

A playroom, Jane wondered. An office? But there was another door across from Tomas’ room, just as blank, locked when she grasped at it absently. But—

Her hand lingered by the doorknob, shaking uncontrollably. A sudden chill blanketed the back of her neck, flooded sick up her throat, until her vision dotted with black. She abandoned the doorknob and fumbled for the wall, sliding down it gracelessly. Her knees folded up to her chest. Her own breaths rattled in her ears.

“Why is your flat so big?” she asked Tomas, as he slipped back out into the hall. “It’s just you and your mum, why are there so many other rooms?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Mama says not to go in them.”

“But _why_?” she demanded, still trembling. Tomas ignored her, gaze fixing on the doorknob she’d abandoned. Warm light beckoned, seeping through the hinges, the bottom of the door. Tomas placed a small hand against its peeling paint.

“It’s summer,” he said quietly. “I can smell it. I think it’s following me.”

There was a faint whiff of the outdoors tickling her nose, warm and grassy, but it wasn’t filling Jane with confidence. Mostly, it was turning her legs to jelly.

“Tomas,” she whispered. She struggled to her feet, knees trembling. “It’s locked.”

“Only sometimes,” he said. “Try again.”

“I don’t think we should.”

“Don’t you want to see?” he demanded quietly, glancing at her over his shoulder.

“I—” Despite herself, the locked doorknob turned easily under her hand, hinges squealing faintly with disuse.Was she curious? She wasn’t sure. She wasn’t sure she’d ever been curious about anything before. “Tomas, I think—”

The nursery was painted a dull green. Even in the impossibly warm light, the incongruous sun shining through the window at half seven in the evening, it looked gloomy and unloved. Dust coated the crib, the rocking horse in the corner, caught sunbeams near the window. Another bed was shoved up against the opposite wall. Its pink quilt was untouched. Jane thought of the red shoes by the door, nausea rising in her throat.

“Tomas,” she said, as he wandered in, frowning. “Tomas, really, I—” Ice flooded the back of her neck, pain driven like a spike from the source. She nearly bit her tongue to keep from groaning. “I don’t—I’ve _seen_ this before—”

Above the crib, there was a crack in the plaster of the wall. Cragged, turned up like a smile. Why did all cracks in time look the same? _Come along, Pond_.

“Don’t touch it,” she whispered. “I mean it, Tomas, don’t get too close—”

He turned back to look at her, confused. His faded pyjamas caught the warm light, the stripes worn through. Jane thought of Louise, oblivious, a room away. They looked so alike, the two of them. The same beautiful hair. The same eyes. She thought of the red shoes, and the men’s slippers, and the empty crib.

“Please,” she begged, head splitting. The urge to fold her hands over her ears was overwhelming, though there was only hungry silence, her own pulse in her teeth. “ _Please_ , don’t get any closer.”

“It’s singing,” Tomas said. “Can’t you hear it?”

She couldn’t hear anything over the roar of blood in her ears, the pain drilling through her skull. The still, silent, summer room was alive with something that shouldn’t have been there, something that didn’t want her, but it wanted Tomas, it yearned for him like nothing else, she could feel the reach of its arms, its spindly, grasping fingers, she could almost _see_ them—

“Tomas?” she breathed.

Before the name could even leave her mouth, she’d forgotten what it meant.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this week's hot tip from me to you, SOMETIMES the solution to your pacing issues is staring you right in the face but involves breaking your fic into a gross odd prime number of chapters and SOMETIMES - you should do it anyway.
> 
> hgfkljdg anyway, this is a shorter one but it needed to be set adrift, so we're rolling with it. thank you so much for reading, and for your kind words! I'm so behind on comments, but I read and appreciate every single one. 
> 
> I hope y'all enjoy, and as always I'd love to know what you think! xo


	8. But you can still sweep the floor

Yaz was dreaming, though she wouldn’t remember it.

In the dream, she walked through a big, empty house. Every step she took echoed tremendously, so much sound that she could almost taste it. Every room was empty. Every door was open. In one of the rooms, there was a crack in the wall, cragged like a smile. When she stepped closer, the air smelled like summer. Sweet grass and sunshine. The smell followed her when she backed away, footsteps echoing on the creaky floorboards, feet slamming down the staircase. The sound followed, too. It clung like a static to the inside of her ears.

She ran from it, down the stairs, through the hall, all the way into the back garden, where rain was coming down in torrents. A marmalade sky lurked beyond the stone garden wall and the scorched, swaying trees.

The little girl from the TARDIS was sitting on a suitcase. Waiting. Her wellies were slick with water, her hair plastered to her forehead.

“You’re too late,” she said.

Yaz woke up.

For a moment, she only let herself breathe. The dream slipped from her mind like rainwater. She didn’t try to hold onto it. She wasn’t meant to. She was never meant to.

She knew every crack and stain and piece of peeling plaster on the ceiling by now. She catalogued them every night, waiting for her eyes to adjust to the gloom, watching her breath fog into the blue. The air was sweet and cold under her nose. Under the blankets it might have been warm, but she knew the moment she rustled the sheets, the cool air would seep under, taking any opening, any opportunity. The barest crack.

Cold white glinted in through the window, lamplight glaring on early November snow. The same cold gloom painted the ceiling, all its cracks and stains and shadows. Everything was quiet like it only got in the dead of night, but not for long. Never for long.

Yaz waited for it, resigned. She imagined she could taste despair like a static, creeping through the thin, plaster-cracked walls. The despair might have been her imagination. The muffled sobbing wasn’t. It never was.

She closed her eyes against her nightly dilemma, that foreign despair crawling, reaching, searching. Guilt that was only her own settled behind her eyelids. She stilled herself, clenched her fists in the thin bedsheets, stayed where she was. There was nothing any of them could do. That was the mantra, that was the truth of it. But it wasn’t _fair_. She thought of Ruth Clayton—the simplicity of her life, the ease of her belief in herself. For the first time, she allowed herself to feel angry on the Doctor’s behalf. This was a poor half-life. The shell around Jane Smith was clearly cracking—maybe it had been cracking from the very beginning—and it was only a matter of time before someone got hurt. And if the TARDIS was right, the shoddiness of its construction was putting the Doctor in danger.

And leaking through the walls, into their heads.

The floorboards in the hallway creaked. Warm yellow light, just for a moment, flooded through the crack in her doorway. She watched through slitted eyes as Graham ambled his way to the bathroom, listened as the water ran.

Only a sliver of the hall was visible to her, but she could see enough. The bathroom light flicked off. He paused outside Jane’s room, a glass of water in hand, barely a silhouette. When he left with a palm on the doorframe, head bowed, the same floorboards creaked.

Yaz’s breath condensed in front of her, hung suspended in the air. Quiet settled back over everything again like a blanket, but the static remained. The remnants of the dream were clinging to her like lint. A sense of urgency had staked itself in the pit of her stomach. If she wasn’t useful, the thought persisted, unearthed, then what was she good for? If she wasn’t doing something good, then _what was she doing_? Alone, in the dark, she was nothing—but she’d left that girl in the midland hills years ago. Hadn’t she wanted to be kinder? Hadn’t she wanted to be _better_?

Her legs swung quietly over the edge of the bed before she could examine the thought too closely, as she steeled herself against the embrace of cold air. She didn’t want to look in the box. She didn’t want to look in the box, but this wasn’t looking, this was just—just—

They were all doing what they had to.

She avoided the same noisy floorboards with practice and let her eyes adjust to the gloom again before she ventured out of her room. Jane’s was right beside, across from the toilet. For a moment, she hesitated outside the door.

The Doctor would have wanted her out in the hall.

But the Doctor, she thought firmly, was out.

With a heaving sigh, she pressed her way in, wincing at the squeak of the doorknob, the creak of her heels on the floor. But Jane slept like the living dead, and she didn’t stir as Yaz filled her doorway, watching.

She was twisted in her blankets, tangled in sheets, even soaked in the gloom. It was too dark to see her face, and Yaz was briefly, horribly glad. She wasn’t muttering any longer. For the moment at least, her dreams had devolved into the quiet despair they always did.

Yaz wasn’t sure this was any better, but at least it was familiar. Less alarming.

 _Where do you go?_ She wanted to ask, and didn’t. Instead, she moved in closer, perched herself on the edge of the bed. Her fingers hovered above Jane’s face, gentle, but she didn’t touch.

“Something’s coming,” Jane mumbled, dream-talking. “Something—something’s coming.”

Was it Jane Smith dreaming, Yaz wondered again, or the Doctor? Maybe it still didn’t matter.

A stripe of moonlight caught across her face, pale and pinched in the gloom. Impenetrable.

“Not while I’m here,” Yaz breathed. “I promise.”

Jane woke with a pounding head and inexplicable dread pooled in her stomach. Her alarm clock was trilling half-heartedly, like it did every morning. The sound hadn’t worked quite right, ever since she’d smacked it onto the floor, weeks ago. The half-shattered clock-face caught the morning light as she struggled upright.

Her breath hung in front of her face, like it did every morning. She watched it evaporate tiredly. There must have been a time before this, she mused uneasily, feeling strangely unbalanced. There must have been a life before alarm clocks and breath that fogged into the air and the woollen socks she pulled on every morning, but she couldn’t remember it. If she couldn’t remember it, she thought dully, then what did it mean?

She shoved the alarm clock off the bedside table again with her free hand, listened to it crunch on the ground and go silent.

It was only satisfying for a moment. With a heaving sigh, she leaned down to pick it up gingerly.

“Sorry,” she told it quietly, placing it tenderly back on its table. The clock-face stared back at her accusingly, now frozen forever at a quarter to eight. _Late_ , it seemed to say. _You’re already too late_.

The faint thought surfaced, that she had another watch, somewhere. An old pocket watch, on a rusted old chain, but she couldn’t for the life of her remember where she’d put it. She pulled her socks on instead, glumly. _Late_. Well, it wasn’t like she’d ever been on time before. Now she never would be. Jane Smith, late-comer. It was about the only thing about herself she could be certain of. Only today, she thought, swallowing back a yawn, it wasn’t sitting quite right.

The floorboards creaked as she made her way out of her room, not bothering to rush. There hardly seemed a point to it, today. And besides, her head was still pounding. She had half a thought to call down to Mr. Santos, but really, it wasn’t like staying home was any better. Maybe there would be another burst pipe to fix today. A nice distraction. Maybe Louise would stop by again, she thought hopefully, tiptoeing past Graham in the lounge with the morning’s paper, doing her best to sneak past the kitchen. She wasn’t hungry, and she didn’t particularly want to talk to anyone.

Unfortunately, Yaz was an early riser and had ears like a bat.

“Jane,” she said, twisting around from where she was frying eggs at the stove. The smell turned Jane’s stomach, but she smiled gamely anyway. Yaz could never seem to quite manage a smile, but there was something odd in her gaze this morning. Something eager and determined. “Everything alright?”

“Fine,” Jane said. “Er. You?”

Yaz’s face tightened. It was _almost_ a smile, Jane conceded. If you squinted. She was willing to give points for the attempt.

“Great,” Yaz said. “D’you want breakfast?”

Uneasiness solidified in Jane’s gut. “I’ll be late,” she said slowly, suspicious. “You don’t usually—I should—I mean, I should probably—

“Did everything go alright, last night?”

When Jane only looked at her blankly, Yaz’s near-smile dissolved into a frown, which quickly deepened. Her frown was always deepening, somehow, growing in breadth and scope. Jane wasn’t sure she’d ever seen Yaz happy, though she knew, somehow, that when she really smiled, it was beautiful. _Excellent_ , even.

“When you took Tomas home,” Yaz prompted. “Last night, after supper. You never said, you just went straight to bed.”

The words made sense, but they didn’t seem to be attached to anything. Jane hummed noncommittally, stomach sinking. It must have shown on her face.

Yaz’s expression got stuck, sometimes. Her whole body would freeze. Her words would strangle out, like she didn’t want to be saying them, the implication always being that it was somehow Jane’s fault that she had to.

“Never mind,” she said, tightly, though her eyes were glistening darkly. “I mean, don’t worry about it. You sure about breakfast?”

She turned her attention briefly back to the eggs frying on the stove before her gaze returned to Jane, eyebrows raised.

“No,” Jane said quietly. “I’m going to work.”

The hallway of their building stank of mildew and cold, and her feet slipped on the tiles as she made her way downstairs. The dampness was nearly overwhelming. It sat in her bones and wouldn’t leave. Outside, the wind hit, and not even hunching into her thin winter coat could stave it off. She trudged her way miserably next door to the depanneur, and only looked up when the sound of snow underfoot gave way to the crunch of glass.

There was a hole in the window of the shop.

The cold and the wind and her aching head forgotten, Jane stumbled through the front door, the bell tinkling cheerfully. Mr. Santos paused in the act of sweeping. His cheeks were ruddy with the cold. The air from outside was seeping slowly in through the hole.

“Stop,” he told her, an edge to his voice, before she could venture in any closer. “Be careful of the glass.”

“I can help,” she insisted, not bothering to take her coat off. She placed her woven bag by the door. “What happened?”

His moustache quivered, but he didn’t frown.

“A brick through the window,” he said quietly. “Nothing stolen.”

Jane picked her way carefully across the floor, avoiding his disapproving glance. More glass crunched under her feet, despite herself. “ _Why_?”

He shook his head and returned to his sweeping. “Don’t you read the news, girl?”

“Not if I can help it.”

His lips pressed together. “It was only a matter of time. I’m too far from the Boulevard, and people are angry, here. Everyone.” He tsked. “I should advertise my shop in Sicilian. Maybe then the terrorists and the police could spend their time arguing about who has more right to throw bricks through my windows.”

She took the broom from him gently. His knuckles, white around the grip, relented.

“Your signs made them angry,” she said, taking over the sweeping. She bit back a wince at the sound of glass shards scraping against the linoleum. “Because they’re not in French?” Her nose wrinkled. “Or…because they’re not in English?” As a matter of fact, at the moment she was having trouble recalling what language had even graced Mr. Santos’ signs to begin with. “Or…because _you’re_ not French. But you’re not English, either.”

He smiled ruefully at her. “Despite yourself,” he said, not unkindly, “I think you’ve stumbled onto my dilemma. Not that it seems to have mattered to the windows of my shop.”

“But it doesn’t many any sense,” she said. She paused mid-sweep. “It doesn’t have anything to do with you. Why would the terrorists throw a brick through your window?”

“It might not have been a terrorist,” he pointed out. “It could have been anybody. And it’s not about signs or bricks,” he said tiredly. “It’s not even about words. It’s about—” He grumbled for a moment, mostly to himself. In the damp, chilly light, he looked very old. “It’s about something very human.”

“I don’t know what you mean, I don’t think.”

“Well, that’s no surprise,” he told her, eyebrows raised, “if you don’t read the news. Head in the clouds, girl.” His gaze turned a hair critical. “How can you be part of the world, if you don’t pay attention?”

“I pay attention!” she protested, throwing the last of the shards in the bin by the counter. She leaned the broom against it precariously.

“The tanks on the streets, the bricks through the glass, you think this is normal?”

“No,” she sputtered. “Of course not. I—”

“You think it’s right?”

“Well, how am I meant to know?” she countered. “It’s nothing to do with me.”

“Nothing to do with you,” he continued, pressing, “so you can just ignore it, yes? Stay in your comfortable life, where you are late to work everyday—”

“I was nearly on time, today.”

“—where the world fits neatly on the head of a pin, and you have no stake in anything,” he blustered, working himself up to impressive volume, clearly upset with more than just her, “no opinion about anything. You shouldn’t need to wait for the bricks to come through your window to believe in something, Jane Smith.”

“I believe in things,” she said, swallowing tightly at the rebuke. Her eyes stung. “I just don’t—what am I meant to believe in, exactly?”

He shook his head. “Forgive an old man,” he said more quietly, raising an apologetic hand. His fingers were trembling. The disappointment in his eyes lingered. “It doesn’t matter. Help me board up the window, yes?”

Jane hunched deeper into her coat, uneasy, and helped him drag in pieces of broken down plywood boxes and cardboard to plaster over the window. The end result, she thought, fingers slivered and bruised, wasn’t pretty. But it kept the draft out, mostly.

“I’m sorry,” she said, eyeing the ‘closed’ sign still flipped over the door. Ah. English. There was her answer. She wasn’t sure Mr. Santos could afford to stay closed today, but he was a hunched, lonely figure in front of the patched-up window, and at the very least he deserved a strong cup of tea, first.

“It’s okay,” he said quietly. “Thank you, for your help.”

She smiled. “It’s what I’m here for, isn’t it?”

“What are any of us here for,” he muttered. “ _That’s_ the real question. I came here for a quiet life, you know,” he told her as she guided him by the arm away from the window. “A better place for my children. A safe place.”

“I didn’t know you had any children,” she said.

“A daughter.” He lowered himself onto the stool behind the counter with a groan, shoulders caving. “But she has a life of her own,” he said, staring out, straight ahead. “Better things to do than tend the counter in a corner shop.” His eyes drew back to the plastered-over hole. “Better things to do,” he muttered. “For you, as well, Jane.”

“There’s nothing wrong with tending a shop,” she insisted. “I _like_ it.”

“Do you?” He glanced up at her, like she was a mystery he’d never been able to solve. “I think,” he said, still far too kindly, “that you’ve never really thought about it before.”

“Of course I have.” But the protest was stale in her mouth. _Had_ she thought about it before? Jane reached for the ghost of a thought, and couldn’t find one. If she couldn’t remember, she thought again, gazing backwards into an abyss, over the edge of a cliff, then what did it mean? For the first time, the long drop at the edge of her thoughts was beginning to terrify her.

“Have you?” Mr. Santos was still looking at her. “I’ve wondered from the moment I met you. Where do you stand?” he asked, still puzzled, still shaken. “Who _are_ you, Jane Smith?” he demanded quietly, and to her hideous embarrassment she felt tears gather, hot and stinging, behind eyes.

 _I don’t know_ , she wanted to shout, or maybe whisper, or maybe swallow back entirely. The words and their truth soured in her gut. Her face must have twisted with it.

He softened so quickly it was almost funny.

“Oh, no,” he said. “No, no, no, come sit,” he demanded once more, standing abruptly. He took her by the arms and placed her in the stool he’d vacated. “That’s not a challenge,” he told her, taking her spindly hands in his own as he kneeled. His fingers were calloused and warm. “It’s something wonderful. It’s a question you get to answer every day.”

“But I don’t know the answer,” she breathed, voice cracking hideously. “I told you, half the time I don’t even know what I _think_.”

“None of us knows the answer,” he reassured her. He tightened his grip on her hands. “We decide it. Each of us, we decide who we are.”

“What if I’m no-one?” She swallowed thickly. “My head—in my head, sometimes, it’s like there’s _nothing_. How can I be someone, if I don’t remember what I’m meant to be? If I don’t remember what I’ve done?”

“Well, that’s your mistake,” he told her gently, releasing her hands. “Who we are is not what we’ve done. It’s what we do. Here, now. Forget the past. What’s important is the present, the future. Who are you, Jane Smith, means who are you going to _be_?”

She stared at him, her pulse pounding unpleasantly in her throat. A lonely sound in the back of her head. Mr. Santos softened.

“I’ll tell you who I think you are,” he offered quietly. “And maybe you can decide from there. Your head is in the clouds, Jane, but your heart—” He poked her gently in the collarbone. “—is right here. You build snowmen for children and fix pipes for free. You give out discounts we don’t even have to every customer you meet. You’d cut your own feet to help an old man sweep up glass.” He smiled at her. “You’re a good person. You should take comfort in that.”

Jane blinked up at him for a moment, unsure of what to say. Her eyes were still stinging, head throbbing with every empty heartbeat. Inexplicably, the smell of metal had filled her nose.

“Is that enough?” she wondered. “I—”

Before she could finish, Mr. Santos had twisted away to reach into his back pocket. He passed her a handkerchief, frowning. Almost without thought, she pressed it to her nose.

“It’s just the weather,” she said, unconvincingly, because it was exactly what Yaz had told her the other day, when she’d passed her over a piece of kitchen cloth, scowling with worry. When she pulled the handkerchief away, it was soaked in red.

“You should see a doctor,” he told her kindly, eyes crinkling in concern.

The inexplicable urge to laugh was, for a moment, nearly overpowering. She bit it back, and pressed the handkerchief back to her nose.

“Y’know,” she said. “I’m still looking for one.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *slaps the hood of this car* Local Woman Can Fit So Many References to Theseus' Ship References In Doctor Who In This Bad Boy
> 
> by which i mean, of course, the singular reference i could find JKHDFGKFDG
> 
> hoo boy what a week eh


	9. Somnambule

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A short lil one this weekend, but more on the way. thank you as always for reading! As usual, I'm behind on my replies, but I appreciate everyone's thoughts so much! Enjoy!

The day dragged by, clock tick by clock tick. Few customers ventured through Mr. Santos’ doors, even when he finally flipped the sign from ‘closed’ to ‘open’. Jane stayed slumped at the register, eyes fixed on the poorly patched hole in the window, head pounding dully. Fractures spread out from the main break, thin fault lines, spreading like a spider’s web. A draft trickled through, despite their best efforts.

There was something about the window. Her eyes wouldn’t quite focus on it, but she couldn’t seem to tear her gaze away, either.

Eventually, Mr. Santos, with a gentle hand on her shoulder, told her to go home.

“Tomorrow will be brighter,” he told her, though his face was still drawn, his shoulders slumped. “We’ll try again.”

Her trainers caught on glass they’d missed as she left, the crunch of it sharp in her ears. Evening gloom had settled over the city like a blanket. The darkness arrived earlier every day, it seemed. But there was extra light in turn to meet it. Jane paused by the door, gazing out at the glow of street lamps, the lights in people’s windows. Snow drifted down absently in large, wet flakes that settled on the tip of her nose.

She realized, with a growing uneasiness, that she didn’t feel like going home.

Louise answered at the third knock. ‘Bedraggled’ didn’t suit her, but her hair was in untamed ringlets, free of her usual updo. The collar of her shirt was rumpled. The rest of her flat, behind her, was dark except for the sallow light of the kitchen, leaking towards the both of them. A cigarette, barely lit, balanced between two delicate fingers.

“Was I here last night?” Jane asked, without any grace or other greeting.

“I don’t remember,” Louise said, and opened the door wider to let her in.

The coffee was already percolating on the stove. Jane could smell it as soon as she ventured through the front door, tripping as she removed her trainers, eyes catching on the pile of shoes to her left. Men’s slippers. Shiny red children’s shoes. And Louise, alone. Her head pulsed.

“I didn’t know you smoked,” she breathed, straightening. She tore her gaze away to glance at Louise instead, a thin, dark silhouette.

“I don’t.”

“Well, that’s alright, then.”

Louise poured her coffee without asking, and passed it to her in a chipped, ceramic cup. She didn’t offer any milk or any sugar. Jane sipped at it wincingly, joining her at the edge of the kitchen counter.

“I didn’t see you today,” she said quietly. The coffee steamed up her nose, warmed her frost-bitten hands. She could never seem to remember to wear mittens. Couldn’t seem to remember what cold even felt like, until she felt it.

“I went to work,” Louise answered. “But then straight home. I—”

When Jane glanced to her, her brow was pinched. The cigarette trembled in her hands. She seemed to prefer the idea of it more than the act of smoking itself.

“There’s something—” she tried again. Her fingers tightened on the edge of the counter. She twisted round to face the window, and Jane followed. “I don’t know,” she said. “I can’t remember.”

“Join the club,” Jane said.

“But I knew you were coming,” Louise breathed. “I always know.” She exhaled shakily. “Do you think that’s strange?”

“Pretty strange,” Jane offered, leaning her elbows on the counter, resting her chin in her hands. She glanced to Louise, one eyebrow quirking. “But awfully convenient.”

Louise huffed, in what was nearly a laugh. But she sobered quickly.

“Why did you come here, Jane?”

Jane frowned. “I wanted to see you.”

“It’s nearly supper. Won’t your family miss you?”

“I’m meant to work until later. They won’t miss me.” Jane swallowed. The words were true, and the words were neutral, and the words had left her own mouth, but they still stung.

There was a rustle as Louise turned her neck towards her. Her eyes were always searching. A stray curl hung loose above her cheek.

“Why’d you leave?” she asked softly.

Jane drew her elbows back, shuffled closer to the counter. Louise grasped at the edges of her sleeve, the bare skin of her wrist, almost absently. “Someone threw a brick through Mr. Santos’ window last night. Spooked the customers, I think.”

Louise withdrew her hand. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“Well, it wasn’t you that did it.”

“No. But—”

“I might’ve understood,” Jane said quietly. “If you had. Mr. Santos was explaining.”

But Louise shook her head vehemently.

“ _No_ ,” she said firmly. “People want to protect who they are,” she continued. “It’s natural. But out there—” Her voice dropped to a hiss, lips twisting. “All the bombs, the broken windows. It’s not me,” she said, breathless. “It’s not my father, or my mother. And I _deserve_ what you have,” she told Jane, one elbow crashing against the counter as she leaned in, cigarette trailing her hand, “but—but I don’t want it like this.”

Last night’s frost was still coating the window. Jane could hear sirens in the distance. There was a tiny plastic soldier lined up on the ledge, alone.

“I don’t want anyone else to die,” Louise said, eyes glassy in the cigarette’s warm, feeble light. “I don’t want this to be the reason why.”

She shook her head again, curls rustling.

“I’m sorry,” she breathed. “We should talk about something else.”

“No,” Jane said quietly. “No, it’s alright.”

The gloom coating Louise’s apartment was a sickly thing, but it felt private, too. Louise’s cigarette was the only beacon in the sea of black beyond the dim light of the kitchen. The only sallow glow, Louise a backlit silhouette. She shifted, glancing up at Jane, until they were nose to nose.

“Do you ever feel like you’re missing something?” she whispered, her breath warm on Jane’s face. She stubbed her cigarette out into the ash tray, miserably.

“Yes,” Jane said, and kissed her.

It was a fumbling thing, at first, and then something desperate. Their hands tangled together, their bodies pressed close. Louise smelled like cigarettes and perfumed soap. Her lips were dry and her hands were warm. The sensations all mingled together—coffee and mint and sweat and cold air. The smoke lingering. The hum of the kitchen light. It all coalesced, and then, just for a moment, everything stopped and nothing mattered. The world on a pin, halted in its tracks.

They pulled away. Disentangled. Made space between, breaths ragged.

Louise stared at her for a long time, her gaze wide and wet. Whatever she was searching for, Jane wondered. Maybe she’d finally found it. When she spoke, her voice was a rasp.

“You want to see something?” she asked. She held out her hand.

Jane took it.

Winter night sat cold and still, the air tinged pink by streetlights. Jane’s breath fogged in front of her face.

She thought to ask where they were going, but the question died on her lips. Instead, she lost herself to the muffled sound of their footsteps on the unplowed pavement, crunching softly into packed snow and ice and salt, Louise’s hand warm in her own. Flecks of snow were still drifting down absently. It reminded her of the snow globes she’d seen as a little girl, probably. Like they were all suspended in glass, waiting to be shaken.

Louise lead her down street after street, through small alleys. Jane thought to suggest a detour through the underground city, where it would be warmer and drier, but Louise seemed dead-set on a course that Jane was unfamiliar with. They passed narrow side-streets. Once, they darted through a tiny, hidden park. Louise dragged her deep into the old city, where the bricks were cragged and washed and the streets grew thinner. A gust of cold air off the seaway hit them both as they emerged from the shelter of a building. Jane hunched into her thin coat, shivering. The river glinted just beyond the pavement, gleaming black in the watery moonlight. Louise pressed on, possessed. Her fingers stayed wrapped around Jane’s own, until they came to a final, stumbling halt just past the market.

Jane stopped and stared. Then, she blinked.

“I—” she said, mouth opening, and then closing. What she was looking at didn’t make sense.

“There used to be a church here,” Louise said quietly, not letting go of her hand. “My favourite. You could climb to the very top,” she rasped, “and look out onto the water. Reach your hand out to it. I’d spend hours up there, just—looking.” She took a deep, shuddering breath. “And now it’s this instead. A hole in the world.”

“A hole,” Jane murmured. Almost without thinking, she raised a hand towards it. “Or a window?”

“Is it some act of God, do you think?” Louise asked mildly, like she wasn’t entirely convinced but was having trouble reaching for an alternate explanation. “I wasn’t sure anyone else could see it. I thought I was crazy.” Her eyes caught Jane’s own, gleaming dark in the glow from the street lamps, off the snow. “But you can see it,” she whispered. Her shoulders were dusted with snow. So was the top of her hair, glittering flakes caught delicately in the spirals. “You can see what I see.”

Jane kept her hand out, feeling—something, at the tips of her fingers. She watched the impossible wilderness just beyond them breathlessly. Dark forest, just out of her reach. Pine-fresh air, touching her nose. Something gleamed in the snow by her feet. She knelt to pick it up, dragging Louise down with her. It was sharp in her hands. Nausea rose in her throat.

“This is an arrowhead,” she marvelled. “Haudenosaunee.”

“Who?”

“A confederation of sovereign nations. They walked the whole St. Lawrence for centuries, fishing, foraging. Growing things, too. They’re still here, for the record.” She faltered. “But this looks like it’s brand new.” She stood, knees unsteady. Louise was warm at her shoulder, frowning. “It _is_ brand new,” she said, with a certainty she couldn’t explain, resisting the sudden urge to lick it.

The hole in the world gaped. She stared into it, uneasy.

“This shouldn’t be here,” she said mildly. “It’s beautiful but it’s so wrong. Leaking into this world, and our world’s leaking back, it’s like holes in the bottom of a boat, it’ll sink us all—”

She ground a fist into her forehead, the arrowhead sinking into her palm.

“You’re fighting each other over land that doesn’t even belong to you,” she muttered, and the words struggling up her throat felt foreign with disgust, thick with implication that she didn’t understand. “Killing each other for centuries over the ash and bone and beating heart of the people who were here before you. This is a window into a world that you destroyed. How did it—”

And her head split open.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> : )


	10. Eye of the storm

The snowstorm had come fierce, and it had come fast. Yaz had abandoned the washing up to watch it out their kitchen window, gathering in gusts and starts, wailing down the street. Hissing through the crack in the glass.

She’d definitely preferred it from the inside of their flat, but it was too late to turn back now.

“Yaz,” Ryan panted behind her, a hand on her shoulder she could barely feel through the cold. Brutal wind whipped her hair from her face, froze her teeth behind her lips, shocked its way up her nose. She would never be warm again. Right now, she didn’t care. “We’ll never find her in this lot.”

The wind tore his voice from her ears, too, but he was close enough it didn’t matter so much. A stumbling shadow at her back, hunched against the cold, hands shoved into his armpits.

“We have to try,” she shot back over her shoulder, unmoved by the wince of his face, the cramped line of his back. “We’re so _close_ , Ryan—”

“We can’t lose her now,” he finished, eyebrows raising in reproach. “I know. But how do we know she’s out? She’s—she’s a _person_ ,” he said, and when she glanced over her shoulder again, there was a strange look in his eyes. “She’s got her own thoughts, her own plans. Her own mind. Maybe she just—” He faltered, hands falling to his sides. Snow battered the sides of his head, flakes catching in the wool of his toque, delicately in his eyelashes. It was the same argument they’d been having in fits and starts, in camouflaged words, since she’d dragged him out of the flat with her. “Maybe she’s just _out_ ,” he finished.

“All these weeks, all this time, she’s never gone out once,” Yaz gritted out through clenched teeth. “And she just happens to take off, a few days before we’re meant to get out of here? Come on, Ryan.”

He shifted, trudging along behind her reluctantly. “I’m only saying,” he said. “We should have waited a bit longer for her to come back ‘round. There’s no mobile phones or anything, she could be with Graham having tea right now for all we know.”

“I know she’s out here,” Yaz insisted. “And in trouble. She would have told us if she were going somewhere. She would have stopped home first.”

“Would she?” The skepticism in his voice cut like a knife, so Yaz ignored it. “You have to admit, she don’t exactly trust us, these days. And no wonder, Yaz—”

“If you’ve got summat to say,” she ground out, not chancing another glance behind her, “you should just say it.”

“That’s not what I meant.” He caught up to her, feet catching in the snow, slugging against the rapidly growing pile at their feet. It caught the lamplights, glistened wetly, even as the wind picked it up and threw it back in their faces. The sky was a murky howl, far above them. “We did the best we could, but—”

His hand caught her shoulder again. She stopped, reluctantly. Just for a moment. Just for a breath. Snow battered them, cold flecks against her cheeks. Her face was going numb.

“It didn’t work out like I thought,” he admitted to her, guilt colouring his voice. Worry, too. “Like any of us thought, I reckon. It were harder than I thought it would be. But it was hard for her too, I bet.” He was breathing hard, chest heaving in the sallow, murky gloom. Snow frozen to his eyelashes. “So maybe she’s not come home for once, and there’s nothing strange about it.”

The possibility lurked in the depths of her chest, between the spaces of her ribs. Guilt swam there too, but she was so cold, and so lonely, and so _angry_ —

And more than that, so worried. It overtook everything, washed it all out like the tide.

“I can’t go back there yet,” she said, hoarsely. “Maybe you’re right, but it don’t hurt to look. I—”

And it wasn’t a feeling, exactly, wasn’t hardly a _thought_ , but there was something pulling her down the snow-clogged street, towards Rue St. Catherine and further downtown. Something tugging like a hand at her sleeve.

“We’ve got no clue where she might be,” he said gently. It was always Ryan, stepping in with the soft blows, wasn’t it? Delivering the gentle truth to whoever happened to be listening. He was right, was the thing. He was always right.

“It don’t hurt to look,” Yaz said again, half-pleading. “Right? Just a bit longer.”

“Don’t hurt,” Ryan admitted frankly, “except for the part where the two of us go down with frost-bite and they have to dig us out of a snowbank in the morning.” But he zipped the collar of his jacket up a bit further, and nudged her gently with a shoulder. “Where do you wanna look, then? She weren’t at the shop, or at the neighbour’s.”

The _neighbour’s_. The word made Yaz’s blood run a bit cold, though she couldn’t have said entirely why. There was something—something strange there, something that warranted a closer look, but every time she tried to think about it too much, her thoughts would scurry in the other direction.

“I don’t know,” she admitted, the wind tearing her hair from her face. “Just—”

A ghostly hand at her sleeve. Something tugging at the pit of her stomach, onwards, onwards.

“Just forward,” she said, through half-frozen lips.

They struggled on, squinting into the night. Further, further, further, down into the dark and the cold.

As they pressed onward, the wind funnelled itself between the towering glass buildings that littered the downtown, pushed itself between the cracks, through the gaps. The glass shone eerily in the glow from the light pollution, illuminating the towers like beacons through the wash of snow. Pinks and greys and blues. Solemn statues. Yaz wondered at the spectacle of them, how they withstood the wind and the cold and the ice. But they didn’t sway, or move, or sink. No cracks in the glass, though their kitchen window hadn’t fared as well, had it.

Everything would be buried by the morning, she thought uneasily. Even the tanks. They’d have to dig the whole city up. Unearth it again, excavate it like an artefact.

Just when the bite of the wind became so sharp that Yaz considered turning them around, they turned the corner into sudden, blinding sunshine.

The warmth hitting her face was such a shock that Yaz ground to a halt, Ryan knocking into her shoulder, stumbling to a sudden stop. Sunlight glittered through trees that were green and lush with summer. Birdsong echoed, over the distant roar of cars and the water. The warm air held a hint of sweetgrass and hot pavement.

Yaz took a shuddering breath.

“Back up,” she whispered, hardly daring to disturb the sudden quiet. She grasped Ryan by the elbow and guided them both back a step, shuddering again as cold winter air hit the back of her head, until it enveloped them again. As soon as their feet touched the snow-covered pavement behind them, the patch of summer vanished entirely, like it had never been there to begin with.

But when she reached a hand out, her fingers fumbled through the blizzard to touch warm, humid air.

“Yaz,” Ryan hissed, tugging at her sleeve. “Yaz, I don’t think—”

She ignored him and plunged forwards again, into the warmth and sunlight. Not just another season, another time of day entirely.

“Impossible,” she breathed, as Ryan stepped through again reluctantly. She fumbled for the sonic in her jacket pocket, but stopped just short of bringing it out. The TARDIS’ warning rang in her ears. And it wasn’t like she could read it very well, anyway.

“Yaz, I don’t think we should stay here,” Ryan said again, sounding nervous. When she turned, there was a bead of sweat glistening across his forehead, dampening the edges of his toque.

“You’re right,” she told him. “I just—” She glanced back at the lush trees lining the street, the bare cobblestone. The ivy climbing the old brick walls. Blue sky that felt like a long-lost memory. “This is part of it,” she said, uneasy despite the stillness. The quiet, untouched calm. “Another fracture. The TARDIS said the whole city was cracked through.”

“Hell of a crack,” he pointed out nervously.

“Never seen one like this before,” she whispered. “Where were we?”

“Coming up on the Eaton Centre,” he said, fingers still gripped in the sleeve of her jacket. “ _Yaz_ —“

“Fits the pattern,” she breathed. “Ryan, I’m so _close_ —”

“Close to _what_?”

She whirled on him, yanking her sleeve from his grasp. “To understanding what’s going on! These fractures aren’t random, they’re forming a pattern, they’re closing in on something!”

“On _what_?”

Yaz swallowed. The answer had been sitting in front of her, all this time, but she hadn’t wanted to look, had she? She hadn’t wanted to look in the box.

“On us,” she hissed. “On _her_.”

His jaw jumped. “So, what are we gonna do about it?”

It was a demand and a plea all at once.

“I—” she began, the furious certainty simmering in her gut interrupted. “Do you hear that?”

“Birds,” he said, confused. “Cars? Yaz—”

“No,” she said, stepping away from him, turning. The courtyard they’d entered glimmered prettily in the sunlight. “No, there’s something—it’s almost like—”

She swallowed. Between the climbing ivy, the brick was cracked right through.

“—a song,” Yaz said grimly, disappointed in herself.

And then, of course, she had never said anything at all.

Louise caught her under her armpits before she could fall. Her head tipped forward into Louise’s shoulder, nose pressing into the fabric of her coat with a strangled shout. The hole in the world rippled and shook.

“ _Jane_ ,” she whispered, struggling backwards, heels catching on the cobbled pavement. A prayer strangled out, when there was no reply, when the hole in the world yawned and shuddered, a hungry maw, its eye fixed on Louise—

 _You can’t have this, too_ , she thought furiously, and dragged the both of them back. Jane’s feet scraped against the ice and salt, scrabbling weakly for purchase. Her hand grasped weakly at the fabric of Louise’s coat.

“I don’t know what to do,” Louise said, hair torn from her shoulders, eyes tearing up at the sudden cold. “I don’t—I don’t— _tell me what to do_.”

In the distance, the sky rumbled. In the back of her head, Louise saw a thousand different choices, a thousand different outcomes. In some, she stumbled backwards into the street, into the path of an oncoming car, sent screeching into the elements. In others, she took them forwards into the hole in the world, let it swallow them both. In some, she only stayed where was, held Jane tightly to her, and let the storm run its course.

There was always, of course, a better option.

“Louise,” Jane whispered into her collar, weakly. “ _Run_.”

Louise shifted, until Jane’s feet were planted more sturdily into the ground, uneven breaths hot against her neck, and stumbled back the way they’d came, snowflakes spitting at her face, the hole in the world a hungry eye at her back. The wind howled. Her fingers whitened in the fabric of Jane’s thin winter coat as she dragged her along, feet catching in the cobblestone.

The cold air was metal in her nose, fire on her bare skin. For once in her life, she hadn’t seen the storm coming.

“We’ll go down,” she said, as loudly as she could, tripping along, Jane upright in her iron grasp. “Into the underground city, okay? It’s warmer.” Maybe not safer. “We can take the metro home.”

“Empty pockets,” Jane gasped into her ear. “It’s alright. It’ll be fine. I can walk,” she insisted knees buckling. Louise caught her again, strangled her upright. The wind bit at her face, tore at her hair. Tree branches creaked in the distance, the shadow of them reaching like fingers through the glare of the street-lamps, the flurry of snowflakes.

Louise squinted through the glare and pressed them forwards, squeezed through narrow alleys back into the downtown, where the streets were cordoned off, where soldiers roamed absently. Trading one wilderness for another.

“Down here,” she breathed, ducking into the shelter of a mezzanine. The sudden warmth was shocking. Her nose stung. She pulled Jane into the shadows of the entrance, out of sight. Outside, snow flung itself against the glass, the wind screeching in dissatisfaction. Her heart hammered in her throat. For a moment, the two of them only breathed, soaking in the sudden silence. The mezzanine was all but empty, the shops closed and battered down. The distant rumble of the metro echoed eerily beneath them. Outside, the basilica’s windows glinted in the streetlights.

“I’m sorry,” Louise breathed, shaking. “I didn’t think—I don’t understand—” Her breaths hissed in her own ears, heart pounding. “I don’t understand what’s happening,” she admitted, sinking to the grimy floor. Jane sank with her, fingers still white-knuckled in her coat. She let go of her coat to pat Louise gently on the shoulder.

“Clearly,” she said, “it’s a spatio-temporal fracture, Blinovitch-class. That little window into the past is a classic symptom, absolutely textbook, I could do the maths about it in my sleep, the _problem_ —”

Her glazed eyes fixed on Louise, and for a moment they looked nothing like Jane’s at all. A wavering finger rose to tap her gently on the nose. “—is you,” she said.

And promptly fainted.

Louise couldn’t remember the name of the man who greeted them at the door to Jane’s flat, but he didn’t look at all surprised to see them.

“Oh, Doc,” he sighed, nonsensically. He offered his arms out, but Louise shook her head minutely. In the weak, sallow light of the hall, he looked far frailer than she felt.

“It’s okay,” she breathed, Jane’s arm still limp around the back of her neck, slumped against her like a rag doll. “I’ve got her. She’s okay. I’m so—”

“It’s alright,” the older man said, eyes crinkling kindly, worry turning the corners of his mouth. “Tell me later. You go on, I’ll put the kettle on.”

He vanished from the cramped entry hall, and Louise ventured into their flat, wincing at the creak of the floors. The layout was a mirror of her own. A kitchen off the door, and a long hallway that stretched past a front room to the cramped bedrooms just beyond. She hoisted Jane’s dead weight higher at the hip and straggled her way down the hall, tracking mud and snow and salt. The moldy, sour smell ground into the entry mat followed them, lingering in the wool of their socks, the fabric of their coats. The plastered ceiling above them was cracked and dark with damp. She knew Jane’s room had to be the one across from the toilet—the mess within had sprawled past the doorway in the form of socks caught in the hinge, a book laying abandoned in the hall. Loose papers, sprinkled like confetti.

Inside, the blinds were drawn and the lamp wouldn’t light. Louise maneuvered Jane onto the bed in the dark, eyes adjusting as she removed the other woman’s shoes, as she unlaced them absently. Snow melted onto the duvet, drip by drip. When she was done, Louise perched on the edge of the bed, uncertainly. Unnerved, by the silence, by the storm still beating at the window. By the strangeness, outside and in. Her eye caught the drawn blinds. If she opened them, she felt sure she would be able to feel the hole in the world, its eye still fixed to her like a beacon.

“I don’t know what to do,” she whispered into the gloom. Jane didn’t answer. Her eyelids fluttered, but her breaths stayed even and steady. “But I’m not sure you do, either. I’m sorry,” she breathed, reaching a hesitant hand out towards Jane’s cheek. Her fingers stopped just short, hovering. “If it’s my fault,” she whispered, feeling very alone, “then I’m sorry.”

Louise withdrew her hand. Even in the gloom, she could see that clothes were strewn across the floor of Jane’s room, books half-read and abandoned. The alarm clock perched precariously on the bedside table was cracked right through, the clock-face nearly shattered. She swallowed, unnerved by the mess. Unnerved by the picture it painted, by the absent-minded cruelty of everything abandoned on the floor.

Almost without thinking, she rose to stand, gathering books in the gloom. She stacked them on the bedside table. The socks came next, and then the clothes. In the midst of it she found all sorts of things—teacups and Scrabble pieces and strange little trinkets. More scribbled-on papers, crumpled up and abandoned. She smoothed them out, one by one. Squinted down at a lighthouse rendered in pen. A police box, half-buried. A young woman’s face, half-smiling.

She set them gently on top of the stack of books, and knelt to grab a pair of wrinkled corduroy trousers off the floor, frowning at the odd weight of them. It all had the feel of something that didn’t belong in the laundry, and she reached in the gloom into the pocket. Her fingers caught on something cool, something smooth. Her hand emerged clutching a pocket watch. Strange symbols were carved into the top, gleaming faintly in the sickly light from the hall.

Her heart pounded in her chest.

 _Open it_ , something whispered at the back of her head. _Open it, don’t you want to see? Let me out, let me breathe again_ , _let me be who I am—_

Louise cracked open the watch.

On the bed behind her, Jane hissed out a violent breath. A warm glow stretched towards Louise, like dust caught in sunbeams, warm breath on her face, her father’s hand in her own—

“Alright, cockle?”

She slammed the watch shut. The silhouette of Jane’s uncle filled the doorway, his face obscured. Unsure why exactly she was doing it, Louise spirited the watch into her other hand, into the pocket of her skirt.

There were two mugs in his hand. When her eyes adjusted to the light, there was a strange look to his gaze. Uncertainty, caught in the turn of his mouth.

“I—I brought some tea,” he said hesitantly. “Cuppa heals all, right?”

Louise preferred coffee, but she would never say so. She stood unsteadily.

“Thank you,” she said, glancing back at Jane. “I’m—”

“It’s okay,” he reassured, peering over her shoulder. “It—” He swallowed. “Things happen, sometimes. Strange things. But it ain’t your fault, I reckon. Is she okay?” His eyes shone. “Is she—?”

“She’s just sleeping.” Her heartbeat had been strong against Louise’s fingers, breaths steady, forehead smooth. “But I—”

The fear that had nearly overtaken her in the metro station bubbled up her throat again.

“I don’t understand what’s happening,” she admitted, hands wrapping around the proffered cup. She followed Jane’s uncle out of the bedroom, into the sallow hallway, the front room with its sagging chesterfield and ragged carpet. “I don’t even—” Her breath caught in her throat, suddenly struck by how rude she must have seemed. “I’m sorry, but I don’t even know your name.”

“Graham,” he answered, leading her to a well-worn armchair. “And you’re Louise. She talks about you,” he said, smiling ruefully. “To me, at least.”

Louise settled in it gingerly. “We barely know each other,” she said softly.

“You’ve been a good friend.”

Louise swallowed. Heat rose in her cheek, despite herself.

“She’s a good person,” she breathed. “She’s—she’s—”

How to explain, the emptiness in her house to a stranger? The empty space between her ribs?

The guilt, sitting like a stone in the pit of her stomach. She’d taken someone she loved to her hole in the world, and it had nearly torn them from her. Torn them from her—

Torn them from her. Like everything else that sat like a blankness in her heart.

“I should go,” she whispered. She set her cup of tea on the coffee table and stood abruptly. Her shoes—god, her _shoes_ , she was wearing _shoes in someone else’s house_ , and if her mother had been alive—were leaving stains in the carpet. The realisation sat like ice in her heart. “I have to go.”

Graham startled. “But—” he said. His face softened, almost like a reflex. “It’s alright, love,” he said gently. “I told you, strange things have been happening around here. It’s not your fault,” he said, troubled. There was still something odd in his eyes. Something vacant and strange. Some pain he hadn’t noticed yet. “And I’m—” he swallowed. “I don’t know what to say, but I’m not sure it’s safe out there. Not sure the night’s over yet. Maybe—”

He glanced uncertainly towards the hallway.

“Oh, I wish she were here,” he breathed. A prayer that didn’t make sense. “You can stay,” he offered in the next moment. “I promise, it’s alright.”

But the lights were flickering and yellow and her shoes were leaving stains in the carpet and she was a nothing person, surrounded by shadows. No past, no future. The present rubble under her feet. Everything she cared for—everything she—

“It’s not safe,” she whispered, more certain by the second, sureness growing in her like a cancer. “I have to go. I have to—”

She stumbled towards the door, palm scraping against the ragged plaster of the walls, the mildewy smell of the entry mat rising to greet her. Jane’s breaths echoed in her ears, the silent gloom beyond the hallway taunting. The watch she’d stolen heavy in her pocket.

“Louise—”

Behind her, Graham had risen to his feet, unsteady. He’d been so kind to her. Another person in a crossfire that she didn’t understand. But she could spare him, too. She could spare what was left of them all.

Louise fled.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> well well well if it isn't little old me, *checks watch*, approximately seventy years later? listen i was on holiday. also I couldn't stomach the idea of disappearing the fam, even though it was absolutely the thing to do that made the most sense, and so I decided it was better to dither about it for about a decade first RIP
> 
> anyway, happy holidays, and I hope you enjoy! as always thanks so much for reading, and I'd love to know what you thought!


	11. By her bootstraps

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> mind the TW violence, just briefly at the end of this chapter gang xx

_Montreal, 1945_

“Michel,” his wife was saying, over the sound of snow crunching under tires, the radio crackling, the wind hissing faintly through the crack in the passenger window. There was a smile in her voice. He could hear it. “We’d get there much faster if you wouldn’t keep stopping.”

He smiled in return, turning a sharp corner carefully, the winding road growing narrower as they drove further into the forest.

“But there’s so much to see,” he protested lightly, one hand off the wheel to gesture in front of him. “Look at all of this, my love.”

“A tree,” she said dryly. “And look—more trees. More snow.”

“Fresh air,” he said, determined. “And look at how the snow sparkles on the tree branches. There’s nothing like this in the city.”

“There’s no roads like this in the city, either,” she pointed out, arms crossing as they jostled their way over another hole. “Are you sure—?”

“It’ll be fine,” he insisted. He took a hand off the wheel again, in offer. She took it, and he squeezed reassuringly. He chanced a brief glance sideways, caught her lovely eyes, her curly hair. Her face, caught and pinched between fondness and disapproval. “I promise. Where we’re headed, it’s the most beautiful place in the world.”

She shook her head, still fond. “You say that about everywhere,” she said. “You won’t be saying that when the car gets stuck in the snow.”

“It won’t—” he said, and then nearly bit his tongue as the car stalled, as they were jerked in their seats. His wife’s hands tightened on the arm of her seat.

“ _Michel_ ,” she warned, as the engine buckled.

“We’re not stuck,” he said, taking his foot off the pedal. They were most certainly stuck. “Here, let me see. Don’t worry.” He flashed a smile in her direction, promising. Her face softened, by a millimetre.

“Be careful,” she said.

He lifted a curl away from her face, gently, and ducked his way out of the car, feet crunching on the snow. The sun was blinding overhead. Ice crystals caught in the air, suspended. _Beautiful_ , he thought, still smiling, even though the chill was seeping through the thin material of his coat, the ragged scarf at his neck.

They couldn’t afford to get stuck in the snow, he thought, making his way towards the back of the car. They could barely afford the car to begin with. But his brother’s cabin was waiting, warmth and adventure and a weekend to themselves. Fresh pine in the air, ice like crystals. Like a snow globe, he thought, taking a moment for himself to gaze upwards into the trees, into the sky blazing blue above him. Like a postcard. He couldn’t afford to worry. The world was far too beautiful.

The snow underneath the tires was barely a few centimetres tall. An engine problem then, maybe. He sighed.

“Well,” he breathed, resigning himself to the delay. “Let’s see, here…”

Before he could pop the boot of the car open, his eye caught the sheen of a frozen puddle. His foot had nearly plunged right through it on his way to the back of the car, sent it shattering into pieces like a mirror. What was left of the ice was held together by the barest crack.

Of course, the barest crack was sometimes all it took.

_Montreal, 1970_

Louise was dreaming, though she wouldn’t remember it.

In the dream, she was standing at the top of a flight of stairs, looking down into an impossible room, listening to a conversation that she didn’t understand.

“What makes time crack, then?” There was a girl, frowning as she leaned against a column made of crystal. It towered over her like a spider’s leg, gleaming. “You said it was leaving breadcrumbs. What leaves them, exactly?”

“Oh, all sorts of things.” Jane glanced up—though the woman at the centre of the strange, crystalline room didn’t look quite like Jane was supposed to. There was a sharpness to the corner of her lips. Her shoulders were broader. Her eyes were much older. “Big things, sometimes. Catastrophically big. End-of-the-universe big. Blow-up-the-TARDIS big. _This_ isn’t—catastrophically big, I mean. It’s small. Cafe-sized. Probably nothing.”

The older man sitting just below Louise on the stairs shifted nervously. “That’s not your ‘probably nothing’ voice,” he pointed out. “Come on, Doc, you don’t have to sugarcoat it.”

“If it wasn’t perfectly safe, I wouldn’t have taken you for drinks in it,” she tossed over her shoulder, hands working in a mess of wires and strange levers. “It’s this next bit which might be tricky,” she admitted. “The cafes are just the localized effect. Symptoms, rippling out into the time stream. Harmless, mostly.”

The girl’s frown deepened.

“But we’re headed straight for the source.”

“Gold star!”

There was another, younger man, braced against another spindly, crystal spider’s leg.

“And that’s not gonna cause any problems,” he said dryly. “We’ll be home in time for lunch.”

The woman who wasn’t Jane stilled. “If you like,” she said, too lightly.

“But if it’s not catastrophically big, then—”

“—it’s still worth investigating.” Her hair caught the light warmly as she moved. Her voice had gone tight, if you knew to listen for it. “The web of time is strong, but it’s also—” She swallowed. “Well, it can be a bit delicate. If you shatter a bowl once and glue it back together, you can’t drop it again.”

“You never shattered the bowl of the universe, Doc.” The man on the stairs looked like he desperately wished he was joking. “Right?”

Her head shot up. “‘Course not,” she said, eventually. “Besides, this is completely different. Just a bit of poisoned time. Shard of glass in the foot of the universe. But,” and she threw down another lever with a flourish. The crystalline room began to shudder gently. The air filled with a wheezing sound. “It’s still worth taking care of. That’s where we come in, right? No job too small.”

“Sortin’ out the universe,” the younger man said, with a small, resigned smile. “That’s us.”

“Doctor.” The woman by the pillar was still frowning. “You never said, though. What caused this to happen? What made time crack in the first place?”

The air was growing fuzzy, the conversation dimming. Louise squinted, straining, fingers whitening around the stair rail turning ghostly under her grip.

“I don’t know,” the woman who wasn’t Jane said, after a moment. “I suppose we’ll have to find out, won’t we?”

“But what will happen, if we don’t?” the young woman pressed.

There was a long pause, and the words that came after were static in the air, breath on glass.

“I’m not sure,” The woman stilled. “It depends. Some cracks lead to other places. Pocket dimensions, other universes. Some just—circle back. Most cracks in time are just that, y’know. Fractures, trying to heal. Two pieces,” she breathed, “trying to become one.”

Louise plunged towards wakefulness, in the same way that divers plunged into the sea. The early morning darkness, when she opened her eyes, was as deep as the ocean. Just as silent. Just as empty.

Her bedroom was cold. Her gasping breaths echoed off the walls, into the corners. A hand grasped at the empty space beside her, and it was all empty space beside her, wasn’t it? Backwards and forwards. Hadn’t it always been?

But her bed was too big for one person, and her flat had too many rooms, and her closet had too many coats, and her entry hall was crowded with too many shoes.

She hunched deeper into the bedsheets and twisted to face the door, eyes adjusting slowly to the gloom. Sleet pounded at the window behind her. As the night grew on, the snow had turned to freezing rain and slush. It would stop at a quarter past ten, she knew instinctively. But there would be no sun. Not for days.

The pocket watch gleamed quietly on the bedside table, where she’d left it.

 _Let me out_ , she heard, breath on the back of her neck. _Let me free_.

Was she lonely enough, she wondered, to open it? Was she lonely enough that a disembodied voice would do for company?

Disembodied, the thought lingered. Disembodied, but not unfamiliar. God, but she really was losing her grip on everything. Hearing voices, seeing things.

 _Stealing_ things.

She sat up, before she could talk herself out of it. Braced herself against the chill, out from under the warmth of the bedsheets, and snatched the watch off the table. It was cold in her hands. But—

It thrummed quietly, as she held it to her ear. Fluttered like a hummingbird in her palm. Or a heartbeat.

Louise crossed herself absently and opened it.

“ _Do you know,_ ” a voice breathed, “ _what it means to be wanderers in the fourth dimensions? Exiles_ ,” it sighed, before another voice overtook it. “ _Decadent, degenerate, and rotten to the core_ ,” another voice snarled, as another whispered, “ _could I do it? Could I touch the wires together, do I have the right? Do I have the right?_ ”

“ _There’s no point in being grown-up if you can’t be childish, sometimes_ ,” yet another voice mused. “— _never met anyone who wasn’t important_ ,” another promised. “ _But_ _I got worse_ ,” a different voice said, cracking. “ _I got clever,”_ it sighed, breaking like a wave on the shore. _“Always try to be nice,”_ another voice interrupted. “ _But never fail to be kind._ ” A smoother voice. “ _Follow the light_ ,” it breathed. “ _Break the glass._ ”

“ _I’m just a traveler,_ ” Jane’s voice whispered, louder than the rest.

Louise slammed the watch shut. The voices quieted, but they didn’t disappear. Gold glittered like dust hanging in the air.

“Please,” she breathed. “If—if someone would just tell me what to do,” she pleaded, voice cracking.

But the watch had quieted. It was thrumming softly in her hands again, like something asleep. Waiting.

She held it to her ear again, and listened to the lonely beating of its heart.

Across the hall, but far away, Graham was missing something.

Sleet wailed against the glass. Sombre pink sodium lights trickled in from outside, left funny patterns across the sofa cushions. His tea had long gone cool. He had half a mind to clear it away, but there was some strange thought lurking at the back of his head. Some strange notion, ever since he’d sat down, that if he got up and went to the kitchen he might not come back out again.

He’d have to clear it all away, eventually. He didn’t like leaving a mess, he’d grown up proper, he’d been married—he’d been married—

Ah, he thought to himself, leaning back on the sofa with a sigh. The yellow toque in his trembling hands caught the sodium lights. That was it, then, wasn’t it? Like a piece of a jigsaw he was missing. Only jigsaw pieces were so small, and the thing he was missing was as big as the universe.

There was nothing for it. And there was nothing, he thought mildly, left for him without it.

He set the toque gently on the sofa, left it watered down in outside light. Then, he uncapped a pen from the coffee table with his teeth and scrawled a message on the newspaper. Over the crosswords they never managed to finish.

Jane’s quiet breathing was the only sound in the whole flat. It carried through the empty rooms, into the hallway’s dark corners. There wasn’t any siren song that he could hear, but he rose to his feet with a quiet groan anyway, and rescued his abandoned cup of tea from the coffee table. It had left rust-coloured rings in the old wood. Outside, the wind howled. The shadows of tree branches reached like creeping fingers.

“Alright, alright,” he sighed, and trudged silently into the kitchen. “There’s no need for all the racket,” he said, as he emptied his cup into the sink, left it clean on the other side.

When he was done, he turned to face the crack in the window. The wind hissed through it, a single, piercing note.

“Well,” he sighed. “It weren’t exactly Paris, was it, Doc.”

And the wind took him away, too.

By the time Jane stumbled blearily into the front room, the snow and sleet had cleared away into weak, watery daylight. Clouds and smog were smeared across the skyline, just beyond the window. She was late, she thought, through the film of exhaustion catching cotton behind her eyes. Late for work, late for…something.

And there was something, she thought, listening to her own heart thumping in her ears, that she was missing.

Her head throbbed, suddenly, blindingly. She clamped her boney fingers to her forehead and crouched, palms pressing into her eyes. There was something—there was _something_ —

Something. Many things. _Too_ many things. Her flat wasn’t meant to be this empty. Even in the dark, with her hands pressed over her face, she knew that much. And the night before was a blur, but she could remember brief flashes of snow and sleet, the rumble of the metro. Terrible dreams. A forest, spilling out from a rip in the world.

“Louise,” she whispered.

And there was something else, something more, something _big_ , and if she could only pry her fingers from her skull and look—if she were only _smart_ enough, if she were only _brave_ enough—and that was the problem with her, she knew with a blinding, suffocating certainty. She was a nothing person. Watery, weak-willed nothing.

But she could choose to be different, she decided, wrenching her hands away from her face. She squinted blearily into the grey.

She could choose to be who she was.

Hand clamped on the arm of a ratty chair, she leveraged herself up, heart still pounding away at the back of her head. The floor creaked as she wove through the front room, fingers trailing over the furniture. There was a toque abandoned on the sofa. A cardigan strewn over the armchair. Fresh stains on the coffee table, soaked into the newspaper.

Creeping across the ink, scrawled across the open page.

She snatched at the paper and brought it up to her nose as she sank into the sofa.

 _JANE_ , she read. _NOVEMBER 4_ _TH_. _MIND THE CRACKS._ _OPEN THE WATCH_.

“Today,” she breathed. “What watch? Oh,” she realized, a flash of metal and cold nudging up against her memory. “ _That_ watch.”

She scrambled to her feet, headache forgotten, newspaper still clenched in one hand. The only reminder of something she’d somehow forgotten, and it felt like clutching a lifeline. An anchor to something she didn’t even remember, but the empty space of it sat there like an afterimage. Something important. Something big.

They had always, she thought absently, looked at her like they were expecting someone else.

“Watch,” she muttered, skidding to a halt at the door to her bedroom. “Watch,” and it wasn’t under the bed, “watch,” or under the loose floorboard, “watch,” or in any of the pockets of her suspiciously folded clothes, “watch,” or folded up in any blankets or socks, “ _watch_ ,” she seethed desperately, pulling up the rug, sneezing at the unearthed dust.

Nothing. Nothing but dust and folded clothes and books she could never be bothered to read and terrible, scratchy pencil sketches, flung up by the force of her search. She sank to the ground, newspaper still clutched in one hand. The other scrabbled gracelessly over the hardwood, snatched a drawing from the air as it floated listlessly off the bedside table.

Half of a girl’s face stared back at her, dark eyes almost baleful. _How dare she forget?_

Her head pounded. Something that felt like a memory but couldn’t be soured her tongue. “If you can remember it,” she whispered desperately, fingertips whitening over the crumpled page, “it can _come back_.”

But the back of her head stayed as disturbingly blank as it always did, and the girl’s face stayed empty of any meaning. Just an afterimage.

She was entirely alone.

And really, there was only one place left that she could possibly go.

She tore out of her flat, still dressed in the clothes she’d woken up in, crumpled and wrinkled and salt-stained. When there was no answer at Louise’s, she continued tearing down the stairs, slipping on the damp tiles, barely registering the chill as her bare skin hit the cold air.

The depanneur beside the flat complex stopped her in her tracks. The door hung off its hinge, the metal rusted into disrepair.

When she pushed her way through, it screeched into the empty air, and there was nothing beyond it. No shelves, or boxes, or coolers. Only peeling paint and sawdust. Rubbish strewn in the corners, glass shards littering the floor.

“No,” Jane muttered, frowning. Heart sinking, although she couldn’t say why. “No, no—”

Her foot crunched on a piece of glass, and she stumbled back outside, head pounding. The shop’s windows were boarded up, but there was an unmistakeable crack, running straight through. A fracture, down the middle. Empty space, left behind.

“Oh, no,” she moaned, skin prickling, and when she turned back to the street, she found more of the same. Boarded up windows and doors smashed in. Empty rows of empty houses.

A whole street, she thought, gobbled up. And who knew what was next. Who knew how far it might spread, trying to get what it really wanted?

“ _Louise_ ,” she breathed, and left the afterimage behind her. Her trainers were battered beyond belief, ill-suited to the cold, and they crunched on the ground underneath her as she ran. Ice and salt and gravel gave way to plowed cobblestone as she tore down the street towards downtown, the old city encroaching like a sea of stone. Cars gave way to tanks, pedestrians gave way to soldiers.

And how, she wondered as she ran, had she ever looked beyond it all? How had she thought, for one second, that this was what life could or _should_ be like?

A whole city, cracked through.

She ran through it all: the gleaming business district, towering like a hall of mirrors; down, briefly, into the underground city, footsteps echoing eerily; up through the mezzanine at Place Des Armes, past the basilica and the reaching branches of the trees in its courtyard; down into the old city, closer and closer to the seaway, until she finally skidded to an uneven halt.

Nestled into the old stone terraces and weathered brick buildings, there was a cafe.

Louise turned at the ring of the bell, and froze.

 _Time Lord_ , hissed the watch in her apron pocket. _Gallifreykasterboroustimelesschildletmeout—_

“Jane,” she said quietly.

“ _Mademoiselle_ ,” the man she was serving said pointedly, as the coffee she’d been pouring him overflowed from his cup to trickle onto the plastic checkered tablecloth. She apologized and handed him several napkins out of her apron, heat rising in her cheeks. Fear bubbling up her throat. She abandoned her coffee pot on his table with a tight smile.

“You can’t be here,” she told Jane lowly, who let herself be dragged amicably from the cafe’s entrance to an empty spot by the window. “It’s not— _I’m_ not—”

“You never told me you worked here,” Jane said mildly, brows drawn together. Her forehead wrinkled, charmingly. “How did I know you worked here?”

“It’s not _safe_ ,” Louise insisted, fingers twisting in the fabric of Jane’s sweater sleeve. “I—last night—”

“You ran away.” The forehead wrinkle deepened. “ _Not_ because I kissed you, right?”

Louise froze. “I—what? No,” she said, dragging Jane a hair closer. “ _No_ ,” she breathed, the watch hissing at her back, growing hot in her pocket. “Jane, there’s something—”

“Something missing,” Jane said firmly, eyes wide. “Something that’s gone. That’s why I came to find you.”

The watch would burn through the fabric of her apron, she was sure of it. Guilt pounded in her teeth, pressure built behind her eyes.

“I—” she tried, and pressed her lips around words that weren’t her own. “I can’t—”

“Whatever it is, it’s not your fault,” Jane said, working her fingers carefully off her sleeve. “Whatever happens next,” she breathed, strangely, “it’s not your fault.”

“There’s something _wrong_ with me,” she hissed.

Jane shook her head. In the weak, watery daylight, her eyes seemed darker. Her shoulders seemed broader. “No, there’s not. It’s okay,” she said. “Let it out.”

“Jack Harkness,” Louise gasped, “Ameliapondcomealongpond _petrichor_ geronimoallons- _y_ —”

“It’s okay,” Jane whispered, taking her gently by the arms. “Something has gone terribly wrong,” she said. “But it’s not your fault. And I think I can fix it. I think I—well, I think I can become someone who can fix it,” she said. “But I need your help. I need what you took.”

 _Let me out_ , the watch pleaded.

“I don’t have it,” she lied.

Jane only gazed at her steadily. “Louise,” she said softly. “I know you can feel it. There’s not much time.”

“But—but that’s not you in there,” Louise breathed. “It’s something else. I’ve been listening to it,it’s so lonely. And something’s,” her mouth went dry. “Something’s coming,” she whispered.

Jane smiled gently. “I’m not afraid.”

“But it won’t be _you_ ,” she insisted, the certainty hammering away behind her ribs. “You won’t be you anymore and I—” Her voice cracked. “I _like_ you,” she said.

“D’you know what?” Jane said. Her smile deepened ruefully. She tucked a piece of hair behind her ear. “I like me, too.”

The blast, when it came, was deafening. One last car bomb, in a city cracked through.

It shattered the glass of the cafe window, sent the plastic posters that lined the walls clattering to the floor, the coffee pot spinning into the air. Louise caught a brief glimpse of Jane’s dark, watery gaze before she was tackled down between the tables. Her head smacked against the linoleum. The watch tumbled free of her apron. For a moment, everything went very dark.

The dust and the darkness cleared in fits and starts. Louise coughed her way upright, ears ringing, elbows bruised. As she moved, glass shards and bits of plastic plant fell from her hair to scatter on the ground. Her hand found the watch on the floor, smooth under her palm.

There was a hole where the window had been. Everything smelled, inexplicably, of stale coffee. Already, she could hear the sirens in the distance.

“Jane?” she rasped.

A pale hand clutched weakly at the fabric of her skirt.

“It’s not quite as romantic as I thought it would be,” Jane admitted, bone white and stained with soot. Glass shards in her hair, red smeared at the corner of her mouth. She smiled.

“Jane,” Louise said, scrabbling to her side, glass and plastic plant cutting into her bare knees. The watch pressing into her palm, molten.

“But I don’t regret it,” she said softly, breaths rasping in her throat. A trembling hand reached. “Not one bit.”

“ _Jane_ ,” Louise said.

“Don’t be sad. I know,” she breathed in delight, brushing a tear from Louise’s cheek, “who I am.”

The light dimmed from her eyes.

Louise opened the watch.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> listen I won't lie I've been avoiding writing this bit for uh *checks watch* approximately MONTHS but it was always gonna end like this, even when I was planning it all out rip. it's funny though, how attached I ended up getting to everyone - that's the danger with writing I guess, haha. but listen. stephen king or whoever said it is right. sometimes u have to Literally kill your darlings. but not for fun, just when the plot demands it.
> 
> anyway, NO ONE PANIC, we're not quite done here yet! and thanks as always for reading, I'd love to know what you thought!


	12. Copenhagen interpretation

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> listen we are eight movie stans in this house and i will NOT apologise

_Montreal, November 5_ _ th _ _, 1970_

The blast, when it came, was deafening. One last car bomb, in a city cracked through—shattered glass and plastic posters—spilt coffee in spirals, checkered tablecloth ripped and stained and shredded—and her head slamming against the linoleum and sometimes she died and sometimes she didn’t and sometimes she was hunched over the body of a child and sometimes she was so terribly, terribly alone and _one time_ —

—she saw her own death coming like a simple fact in the back of her head.

And she stepped aside, to avoid it.

Louise gasped awake.

Beside her, René opened his eyes slowly and smiled.

“Okay?” he asked her sleepily in the gloom, one hand reaching out clumsily to palm her cheek. “Louise?”

She lifted a hand to cover his own. 

“Bad dream,” she whispered.

“Well, it’s no wonder,” he said quietly. “After the day you had. I’m so glad you’re alright.”

In the quiet dark, down the hall, she heard Michel begin to fuss. Pressure built behind her eyes.

“Alright?”

A hint of worry began to scald away the sleep in his eyes.

“The cafe,” he said, gently. “They—they called me at work, I took you home. Remember?”

“Oh,” she said. As he spoke, the memory foamed like a wave on the shore. Of course. Of course he had come for her. “Right.”

“But you’re okay?” Those eyes would be the end of her. Dark and light all at once. And—familiar. Familiar, somehow.

“Yeah.” She smiled softly. “I’m okay.”

The door to their bedroom squeaked quietly open. When she twisted, Tomas was illuminated in the doorway. A tiny, solemn silhouette.

“Mama,” he said. At the sound of his voice, a tear slipped down her cheek, and she wasn’t sure why. “Can I have a glass of milk?”

Miranda Boucher shivered in the cool, damp chill of the hospital’s morgue. Not for the first time, she was reconsidering her choice of career.

But there were only two more months left of her residency. Then, she thought morosely, maybe they’d finally let her out of the basement and back into the light. Maybe by then the world would be right side up again.

Until then—well. It wasn’t like she had anywhere else to go.

She sighed down at the empty cot under her hands. She’d wanted to become a doctor to save people. These days, more often than not, she was putting their bodies into cold storage instead. Her eyes caught the dish on the side table, where the pieces of glass she’d meticulously fished out of a woman’s hair glinted solemnly in the gloom. Her scant belongings, wrapped in plastic. There wasn’t much, and that was depressing too, wasn’t it? Nothing but lint in her pockets. And only a small, circular watch, pressed into her palm.

No one had even come to identify the body.

“I’m sorry,” she told the empty air, in what had become a strange, lonely habit.

And she wheeled away the empty cot.

In the quiet left behind, there was a gentle sigh, like the sound someone might make after waking from a very long nap.

And a _clank_. And then, a muffled groan.

“Oh, no,” came a tired-sounding voice, tinny against cold metal. “Not again.”

The wind and the snow against her bare feet ought to have been cold, probably, but she didn’t feel it. The TARDIS pulled at her mind, a homing beacon in the back of her head, and she wandered the old cobbled streets intently, shrouded in the sheet from the morgue. Like a purposeful ghost.

Was that what she was now, she wondered? A ghost. Only that was silly, wasn’t it. She was only herself again. Same hands, same hearts, same face. The same mind. She’d only returned to who she’d been before.

Whoever that was.

At the corner of an intersection, she let her bare feet sink into the ice and salt and took a deep breath of early morning air. There were top-notes of civil unrest and smoked meat, under the crisp smell of cold. Montreal, of course. Layers and layers and layers of city, each more unknowable and different from the last. A citadel of weathered brick and towering glass and old stone, built overtop of what it had been. Cracked through, but not for long.

Well. Cracked through, but maybe not forever.

The paradox still lingered on her lips, but as she walked, she couldn’t taste it in the air anymore. All that remained were the aftershocks, the afterimages. Everything that had been erased would seep back into this reality, like water soaking into a sponge. All it would take, she thought with a strange smile that was meant for no one, was a bit of time.

She ventured deeper into the city, keeping to the shadows as the dimness of early morning slowly melted away. The TARDIS, as it tended to be, was tucked into an alley, graffitied and frost-bitten. Waiting.

Her fingers brushed the frame of the doors, which swung open at her touch. A thoughtful, welcoming hum settled at the back of her brain, as snowflakes gathered at her feet. She watched a few swirl into her ship on the breeze and melt on impact. Quick decay.

 _Dug you up_ , the TARDIS said, pleased. Salt breeze under her nose, blue behind her eyes. _Thief, my thief_. Almost like a song. _Welcome home._

She smiled tiredly, mildly comforted, but her fingertips whitened around the frame. The chameleon arch still dangled from the ceiling, gleaming in cool light, taunting. For a moment, fear lurched so painfully in her gut that she thought she might be ill.

But fear didn’t have to make you cruel, or cowardly. And home was still home, in the end. The only home she had left, now. Her bare feet met cool metal as she stepped inside purposefully. The doors whinged shut behind her, and a last burst of stray snowflakes followed her inside, only to settle and dissolve. Her damp, freezing feet left gleaming footprints as she approached the console. The sheet dragged behind her, shroud-like.

Amelia Pond flickered to life, wellies on, waiting for rain.

“Hello, Pond,” the Doctor said quietly. “I suppose you knew what it was this whole time, didn’t you.”

“Can’t see the storm when you’re in the eye,” the emergency program said. The voice still twisted her stomach.

“Thank you,” she said, though she couldn’t seem to banish the edge from her voice. “For helping my friends.”

The hologram’s expression might have softened, if it was capable.

“Raggedy man.” Fond and quiet. The image disappeared, breath on glass. 

She set the fob watch on the console. The lights dimmed to blue around her, perhaps sensing her unease. A gust of hot air ruffled her hair, warmed her bare shoulders. It might have been an apology. She wasn’t sure she cared, just yet.

“Don’t _ever_ ,” she whispered gently, “do that again.”

The TARDIS dimmed further, at what had only been a threat and a warning and a reproach. The Doctor swallowed thickly, hearts still pounding. Betrayal sticky at the back of her throat. _It’s just you and me_ , she thought but didn’t say out loud.

The TARDIS thrummed.

 _And I will always_ , it whispered, _dig you up_.

Blocks and blocks and blocks away, as the sun crept milkily over the horizon, Ryan Sinclair blinked himself awake.

“What,” he said immediately, on account of he felt absolutely certain that a few moments ago he hadn’t necessarily been alive. He remembered grasping at Yaz’s sleeve, summer warm under his nose, and then—nothing. Well and truly nothing. Nothing like an absence, nothing like an abscess. But when he grasped at the thin bedsheets underneath him, the fabric was real and familiar under his fingers. His eyes tracked the stain on the ceiling of the bedroom he’d been occupying for the past month or so. The smell of coffee was seeping in under the door. _Real_. Familiar.

It might have all been a really bad dream, he supposed as he stumbled blearily out of bed. Or one hell of a night out. Who was he kidding, though? If he’d learned one thing since he’d met the Doctor, it was that things that ought to have been really bad dreams hardly ever were. He tiredly added ‘getting erased from existence’ to his list of things he didn’t have to worry about anymore on account of they had already happened to him, and slunk out into the hallway, blinking at the light. Graham met him in the doorway to the toilet, bleary-eyed. As his foot caught the creaky floorboard, Yaz rocketed out of her own room, eyebrows drawn into a frown. Real. Familiar.

They ventured into the sitting room.

“ _What_ —” Ryan said.

“And what sort of time,” the Doctor wondered, whole and alive and sprawled casually across the sofa, “do you call this?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> one more to gooooooooo
> 
> this one was so short but there are, in fact, Actual Explanations coming. probably. you know, if I can wrangle them. 
> 
> in the meantime, i am/was at the time of writing this SO interested in the fallout from fugitive of the judoon, and the premise for this fic eventually essentially morphed into an exercise in 'what would be the most asshole-y thing you could possibly do to a doctor experiencing an absolute crisis of identity' and the answer. was, uh, this? with a sidehelping of slightly obscure canadian history bc uh, hello, i have a BRAND (and on another note, this year was actually the 50th anniversary of the october crisis and CBC did a really interesting retrospective on the whole thing - obvs I've essentially used it as set dressing here, and it's much more complicated than I've probably represented it rip, but if you're interested def hit me up for some resources/take a google, because it really was a fairly defining moment in cdn history I think, in terms of everything that came after it especially)
> 
> AND I think it's funny (sad funny not funny funny) too, how the doctor still seems to need to learn the lesson that jane finally understood, at the end
> 
> anyway, really excited to see where the show itself is going with the doctor's whole identity crisis, because it's a really interesting concept - I was so glad to see that the special is sort of continuing along with the theme of it all - that i probably haven't entirely done justice but KJDFGKHDG THIS WAS VERY FUN ANYWAY and I'm going to be a bit sad to wrap it up honestly.
> 
> anyway, more on the way, and thank you so much for reading!


	13. How the light gets in

Yaz paused at the mouth of the TARDIS, leather suitcase heavy in her hand. How strange, she found herself thinking. They’d been gone long enough that she had almost stopped thinking of it as home.

“You left us a note,” she said absently, watching as the Doctor barrelled through, seemingly anxious to move on. Full of life again, full of _herself_ again, coat twisting behind her as she moved like she’d never left. “And a paper bag full of money.”

“Well, I haven’t yet,” she pointed out, tossing again over her shoulder. “But I will do. It’s a bit tricky, messing about with the timelines like that, I’ll have to do it delicately—“

“But if you could leave us a note,” Yaz pressed. The thought had been bothering her for weeks. It should have been a relief to finally say it out loud, but all she could feel was an odd sort of numbness. The shock of briefly never-existing, maybe. Or maybe, she thought privately, exhaustion cotton behind her eyelids, she was just tired. She left the damp, cool air behind her and entered on the heels of the boys. Dropped the suitcase at her feet with a clank. “Couldn’t you—couldn’t you just—“

The Doctor paused at the console and turned to look at her. She smiled ruefully.

“I think you know it’s not that simple,” she said. “I wish it were, Yaz. It’s always easier, if you can go back. I’m sorry.”

Yaz thought of the broken watch she kept tucked away in her room, and swallowed.

Ryan swung his bag onto the stairs gingerly. “It’s alright,” he said, eyeing the empty space in the air where the chameleon arch had hung. There was no trace of it left. No trace of anything left. Jane Smith, too, had been washed from the world with no explanation. She still hadn’t told them exactly how she’d managed it. “It’s just—I mean—“

“Well, for a start, you could tell us what the whole thing was about, Doc,” Graham said, settling himself down on the steps with a tired groan. “And how you got us all out of it. I’m a bit blurry on the details, myself. Least you could do is explain.”

The Doctor pursed her lips and tipped her head to the ceiling in thought, arms dangling.

“What,” she said finally, “does a crack in time look like?”

“Er,” Ryan said. He crossed his arms. “Like a run-down cafe. Apparently.”

She snapped her fingers in his direction. “Five points! Why?” Her eyes brightened. “And _how_?”

“You never said.” Yaz watched her move, eyes bright, mouth tight. Playing the game. Already moving on, moving forward. Pulling any real answers from her, she thought sourly, would be like pulling teeth from a cat. “You said it was something small.”

“Something small,” she agreed, stilling. “Like the slightest break in the time stream. One step to the side, and the whole thing fractured. One moment. One person’s life, left in the balance.”

“That woman,” Graham said quietly, with characteristic sharpness. “Louise.”

“Louise,” the Doctor agreed. “She was at the centre of the paradox the whole time. And it was a nasty one, too, it caused itself in the first place, like a snake eating its own tail. The temporal distortion events like that can cause—“ Her chin retreated into her neck slightly in disgust.

“Caused _itself_?” Graham shook his head. “You’ve lost me, Doc.”

“Louise Olivier,” the Doctor recited, eyebrows raising, “born 1946 to two loving parents, married her childhood sweetheart in 1965, mother to three children, coffee-lover, reluctant smoker. Died,” she said, far too lightly, “November 4th, 1970. A car bomb went off in front of the cafe she worked in.”

The newspaper flashed in her mind’s eye. Yaz frowned.

“That’s what started this all, then. How can it have, though?” she ventured, though the answer lurked in the back of her head, and it sounded like a single, echoing gunshot. “How can one single person’s life or death tear holes in the entire universe?”

The Doctor’s nose wrinkled. “Same way a hole in the toe of your sock can unravel the whole thing,” she offered lightly. “Same way you sometimes make the hole bigger when you go in with your sewing needle.” She swallowed. “Especially when the fabric’s already weak. History can change in a blink,” she said, more quietly. “One person’s life can make all the difference, create ripples you might never notice until they’re gone.”

“So she died, then,” Ryan said slowly. “Louise. She died, and the paradox—stopped. Closed. Ended, or whatever.”

“No,” the Doctor said. “She was meant to. But time has branches, and this paradox was nasty. I told you, it created itself. Louise Olivier died on November 4th, 1970.” She paused, probably for effect. “But one time, she _didn’t_.”

The three of them looked back at her exasperatedly.

“I know you’re just waiting for us to ask how,” Graham mustered. “But I’ll be honest, Doc, I am _way_ too tired.”

Her shoulders slumped. Yaz watched her try to hide it. “She’s psychic!” she blustered. “Temporally sensitive! She saw her own death coming, and stepped to the side to avoid it, _brilliant_! Now,” she said, eyebrows raising in expectation, “ask me why she’s psychic.”

“Why is she psychic?” Ryan asked dryly.

The Doctor grinned, rounding the console. “‘Cos she grew up surrounded by sites of massive temporal distortion, that’s why! It’s brilliant! November 4th comes, she _lives_ , and when she does the timeline fractures all along her personal history, which is what _allows_ her to live in the first place.”

“So,” Ryan said, frowning. “…the crack cracked _itself_.”

“Bingo! Take ten points.”

“A snake eating its own tail,” Graham muttered. “Blimey, Doc, you don’t do things by halves, do you?”

Yaz caught a familiar, slightly manic gleam in her eye. “It’s beautiful,” she said, “in its way. _Textbook_ , honestly. And nasty. It probably started small, local. Then when it couldn’t repair itself, it spread like an infection, across space and time.” Her mouth tightened with chagrin. “I should have known better than to drag you all into it. I’m sorry.”

Yaz frowned. “You wouldn’t have gone alone,” she protested. “The TARDIS said the temporal distortion would have killed you.”

The Doctor’s face twisted. “ _Well_ —“ she tried.

“That’s why it hid you away, that’s why it—“

Jane Smith lingered like a ghost on her tongue.

“What happened to her?” Yaz whispered. “You never said. How did you get yourself back? What stopped the crack, then?” She swallowed. “If Louise didn’t die?”

“Paradoxes are hungry,” the Doctor said, a strange look on her face. “They need to be fed.”

Yaz breathed in harshly. “So she must have,” she said. “That’s what’s set it all right again, that’s what closed up the crack. History put back into place.”

She thought of the other woman’s sad, lonely eyes. She’d only ever caught a glimpse of them from afar, but Jane Smith had clearly cared for her. Was it right, she wondered? Was it right that she’d had to die to save them all? Was it right that she’d tried to avoid her own death in the first place? She thought of her broken watch, again. Prem’s face, like a warning. History set right on the backs of people that had deserved far better.

But the Doctor surprised her.

“She didn’t die,” she said again, expression mild, jaw tight. The manic gleam slipping from her. Losing answers like losing teeth. “Jane Smith did.”

Ryan’s jaw jumped, a bit unhappily. “How does that work?” he asked, frowning even as the question left his mouth.

“A life for a life,” the Doctor breathed quietly, hunching over the console, already back to fiddling, back to hair in her face, hiding her eyes. Hiding from them. “Sometimes, that’s all it takes to set things right again.”

“But if you changed the timeline and what happened to Louise never happened, then how did you stop it from happening?”

“Ah, but it did happen, even though it also didn’t. That’s the paradox for you.”

Ryan squinted unhappily.

“It’s all in the maths,” she said, raising her eyebrows, twisting to glance at them. “What’s the sum of minus two and positive two?”

“Zero.” Yaz wrinkled her nose. “Wait. Are you sayin’—”

The Doctor grimaced. “It’s not a perfect analogy, I’ll admit.”

“You can’t fix a paradox with another paradox.”

“Not with that attitude, you can’t.”

“But—“ Yaz stepped closer to place a hand on the console. It thrummed gently beneath her fingers. “She’s alive, then. Louise. And you’re just gonna leave her,” she said, indignation roaring in the pit of her stomach.

 _Is it really that easy_? she wanted to shout. _Is it really that easy to leave someone you cared about behind?_

If it was that easy, a quiet voice pressed at the back of her head, then what did that mean for the rest of them?

“She must think you’re dead,” Yaz went on, when the Doctor glanced at her again, finally. Tight-lipped, flinty.

“The woman she knew,” the Doctor said, “ _is_ dead.”

Yaz stood firm. “Doesn’t she deserve better than that?”

“She deserves far better,” the Doctor said, short. “And that’s what she’s got. That’s the way it has to be.” She swivelled again, hands moving mindlessly against the console, flipping levers, pressing buttons. The TARDIS whirred in mild irritation. “Better to move on,” she said, veneered with false cheer. “Trust me. Speaking of, where to next?”

Over her head, Yaz shared a glance with Graham and Ryan.

“How much do you really remember?” she asked, stalking the Doctor around the console, leaning in until she caught a glimpse of her face. “Don’t lie to us,” she added tiredly, watching said face grow cagey.

The Doctor retreated, then, the way she sometimes did. Disappeared into her own eyes, until her mouth was a bland, unhappy line. Yaz felt the absence like she’d turned her back and left, but she knew there was little point in following. Wherever it was the Doctor went, behind her eyes, it wasn’t a place she wanted to share with them.

“It’s like a dream,” she said, eventually. “Like someone else’s memory. Don’t let it bother you. She wasn’t me, y’know,” she insisted. “She was her own person. You can’t go thinkin’ of us as the same, ‘cos we’re not. She was just—“ She swallowed. “She wasn’t me.”

 _She had terrible nightmares_ , Yaz thought but didn’t say. _And she deserved better than us._ Already the space between them was widening, deepening again. Back to the chasm of before. She was sitting in the hall with her back against a closed door, alone in the dark.

There was nothing, she thought hopelessly, that any one of them could do or say.

“Well, Doc, I don’t know about you,” Graham offered softly from the stairs. There was a firmness to his voice. “But just this once, I’d like to say goodbye.”

The Doctor’s shoulders tightened. For a moment, Yaz wondered if she would slam down the final lever and take them away before they even had the choice. But eventually she sighed and spun around, a plastic smile stretched across her face.

“Of course,” she said kindly. “Of course you can.”

They ventured together back out into the cold, one last time. Only the Doctor seemed unbothered, hands tucked absently into her trouser pockets, coat trailing behind her. Yaz watched her watch the soldiers stationed at the ends of the main streets with mild interest.

“Doctor,” Ryan said, stumbling slightly as he took a step to catch her up. Salt and ice crunched under his feet. His gaze followed her line of sight. “How long does this last?”

“By January it's all back to normal,” she said. “Well.” She considered. “No. Everything's different, from here on out. Leaves a bit of a mark, this one. Long winter. But there's no more tanks on the streets, at least. No more kidnappings. Bit of unrest, still, always, but—” Her hand found the wall of the building they were passing, trailed against the weathered brick. Her expression turned contemplative. “That's history for you.”

Ryan frowned. “But what happens?” he asked. “What happens, after?”

“The grievances don’t just disappear,” the Doctor said. “But the violence stops, mostly. People stay angry, but they start forming political parties, instead of kidnapping people off their front yards. Debating with words, instead of guns and bombs. People like Louise decide the violence went too far, on every side. Sometimes, figuring out who you are,” she offered mildly, “just means deciding who you’re not.”

She brightened.

“And it works, too.” She smiled. “Mostly. By your time, there’ll be a brand new constitution, a whole set of language rights enshrined. No more tanks,” she said, eyes fixed ahead. “And no more bombs. It’s still complicated, it’s all still—imperfect, but it’s better.”

“Better is good,” Ryan breathed, as they approached their old flat. “Better is—better than all that. _Tense_ ,” he said. “Proper tense, that was.”

The Doctor smiled at him reassuringly and held the door open for all of them.

“History ebbs and flows, Ryan,” she said. “Like a river.”

“Thought you said time was like a branch,” he said skeptically, as she followed them into the dimly lit entry. “Or like a bowl or summat.”

“Time isn’t history,” she said simply, and then failed to elaborate. In the gloom of the hall, her eyes were dark. “After you, then.” She glanced towards the stairs. If there was reluctance in the set of her shoulders, Yaz couldn’t read it. She could hardly read anything, lately.

At least Jane Smith, she thought, with a hint of wistful fondness, had been an open book.

The stairs were still slippery, the lights were still dim. But there was a lightness to the air, she noticed, still on the heels of the boys. A wholeness. When Ryan knocked nervously on Number 2, the woman who answered the door was almost unrecognizable.

“Hello?” Louise said softly, a child tucked into her hip with one hand. Whole again, Yaz thought. Happy. You could see it in the lines of her eyes. “Can I—?”

She stilled at the sight of Ryan and Graham.

“It’s you,” she breathed, brow crumpling. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know who to call, or what to do. I barely remember—”

“It’s alright, cockle,” Graham said kindly. He stepped aside. “There’s been a lot of that around.”

The Doctor filled the gap.

For a moment, Louise only stood there frozen. Staring. Then, she smiled sadly.

“You’re not her,” she said quietly. “Are you.”

The Doctor shook her head. “No,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

“Can you bring her back?”

“No.”

“You can’t—“

“I can’t be her,” the Doctor said. Unreadable. It was almost, Yaz noted shrewdly, an apology.

Louise nodded, swallowing sharply. “I see. And the strangeness? The hole in the world?”

“Gone,” the Doctor said. “Closed up. Forever, I hope.”

The baby at Louise’s hip began to fuss. She adjusted her grip on him absently, brought him up to rest at her shoulder. Familiar dark eyes peered out at Yaz curiously.

“It was my fault,” she whispered. Guilt swam behind her eyes. “Wasn’t it. I’m not meant to be here.”

“Yes, you are,” the Doctor insisted gently. She stepped forward, hesitant, and offered a finger to the baby. He grasped hold of it without question. “Of course you are,” she said, smiling.

Louise smiled back, tentatively.

“Louise?” a voice wondered, out of sight of the entry. “Who’s there?”

“Friends,” she said, still smiling. “This is my husband,” she said, as a tall man in a poorly-knit sweater peered over her shoulder at them curiously. “René.” She was still looking at the Doctor. “I have another son,” she breathed. “And a daughter. Charlotte.”

“You always did,” the Doctor said quietly. “And you always will.”

The baby released the Doctor’s finger and she stepped away, back into the shadows on the hall.

“And now you’re going to leave,” Louise said, solemn. “Aren’t you. I saw—” She swallowed. “It’s like a dream, now. But I saw such impossible things.”

“The universe is full of them,” the Doctor said, with solemnness to match. “And there’s still lots to see.”

Louise passed the baby to her husband, who took him happily, but with some bewilderment.

“Before you go,” she said firmly, over her shoulder as she disappeared from view. Her husband stared at them, blinking.

“You know,” he said, absently bouncing the baby. “I don’t—I don’t quite recognize you.”

The Doctor opened, and then closed her mouth. Then, she put her hands back in her pockets.

“It’s a bit—“ Yaz tried, but before she had to think of something reasonable to say, Louise reappeared in the doorway. She stepped out, bare feet on salt-stained tile. The faint smell of coffee drifted out after her.

Her delicate fingers pressed a notebook into the Doctor’s hands.

“For your drawings,” she said, something strange in her eyes. “I—I bought it for you. For her.” She swallowed. “You should take it.”

The Doctor stilled. Her face had drained of colour.

There was a tug on Yaz’s sleeve. She caught Graham’s eye.

“We’ll meet you outside, Doc,” he said. He nodded to Louise with a smile, and guided Ryan and Yaz back down the stairs with a careful hand on their elbows. He didn’t look back.

Yaz paused at the bottom. Graham caught her eye again.

“We’re not meant to see everything,” he said softly. “Leave them to it, eh?”

Her neck ached to turn.

She followed him and Ryan out into the freezing, blinding sun instead.

If the TARDIS objected to their damp, salt-soaked feet on her floors, it didn’t let them know it. Yaz thought briefly of the red-headed child, waiting for rain, and placed a careful hand on the doorframe as she entered.

“That’s that, then,” the Doctor said, spinning on her heels, coat twisting around her knees. Grateful to be back, grateful to be moving. In the dim glow of the TARDIS, Yaz watched as she absently placed a small plastic soldier onto the console, wedged it in between a lever. The notebook was nowhere to be seen, but with the Doctor’s pockets, it could have meant anything. “Where to next?”

“Anywhere’s cool,” Ryan offered, the worried furrow between his brows ever present.

“Could do without another crack in the universe, though, Doc,” Graham said, spent.

Yaz crossed her arms, the TARDIS pulsing warmly above her, against her back where she was wedged against a column. She thought of Prem’s watch, tucked away. She thought of one person’s life, making all the difference. She thought of time, not history, like a snake eating its own tail.

 _Sometimes_ , the Doctor had said, _figuring out who you are just means deciding who you’re not_.

“Doctor,” she said quietly. “If I give you a date and a time, can you take me home? Just for a bit,” she reassured, watching the Doctor’s shoulders tense. “Just for a day or two.”

She smiled thoughtfully. Some of the bitterness fled her heart, scalded away.

“I have an anniversary to keep,” she said.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> well, uh, that's all she wrote 
> 
> VERY weird and strange to be done with this one. I'm not exaggerating when I say that it's been living in my head in one form or another since may of 2019 which feels Literally like a foreign country lmao. it's changed its shape a lot since then (originally it was going to be a convoluted case of Yaz using a souped up vortex manipulator, jumping through time looking for the boys, while the doctor stayed stranded and insensible in Montreal and while that was FUN (listen i stand by the fact that Yaz Needs And Deserves A Sword and also at the time i was mildly fixated on the carolingian franks and this seemed like a solid excuse to dive into that historical period) I'm really happy with the way this turned out. Hopefully it says what it needed to, though of course there's always more and more context and more and more nuance than it's ever possible to provide. And I hope you enjoyed, and thank you so much for reading <3 I hope you're all staying safe and well, and as always I'd so love to hear what you thought
> 
> to finish, here's a few lines from my favourite leonard cohen:
> 
> Ring the bells that still can ring  
> Forget your perfect offering  
> There is a crack, a crack in everything  
> That's how the light gets in
> 
> xoxo Em


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